eleven
o’clock
For nautical reasons that were explained to me , but which I will not trouble to set down , if indeed I could remember them , I believe that if we had returned to Apia we should have missed the great gale and subsequent cyclone , and with these much else . But it was not so fated . It was on the fourth day , when we were roughly seven hundred miles or more north of Samoa , that we met the edge of this gale about sundown . The captain put on steam in the hope of pushing through it , but that night we dined for the first time with the fiddles on , and by eleven o'clock it was as much as one could do to stand in the cabin , while the water was washing freely over the deck . Fortunately , however , the wind veered more aft of us , so that by putting about her head a little -LRB- seamen must forgive me if I talk of these matters as a landlubber -RRB- we ran almost before the wind , though not quite in the direction that we wished to go . When the light came it was blowing very hard indeed , and the sky was utterly overcast , so that we got no glimpse of the sun , or of the stars on the following night . Unfortunately , there was no moon visible ; indeed , if there had been I do not suppose that it would have helped us because of the thick pall of clouds .