noon
Our next care was to hoist in the gig that had served us so well ; and , this done , we settled down to wait for our dinner and the breeze that promised to come ere long . He wind came away about an hour and a half before sunrise , a gentle breeze out from the north-east , coming down to us first of all in the form of a few wandering cats ' - paws , that just wrinkled the oil-smooth surface of the ocean and were gone again , and finally settling into a true breeze that fanned us along at a speed of some four knots , the schooner proving to be a fairly speedy little vessel . Long ere this , however , I had carefully thought out a line of action for myself , in order that when the wind came I might be prepared for it . It will be remembered that before parting company with the launch I had been furnished by the master with a table showing the relative speeds of the various boats , and from that moment I had , with the assistance of the table , carefully calculated the supposed position of each boat at noon ; so that I now knew , to within a few miles , where any particular boat ought to be looked for , upon the assumption that all had gone well with them . And somehow I thought it had ; I was very strongly impressed with the belief that the gale which we had encountered had not extended far enough to the south-east to reach the launch and the rest of the squadron . Flowers it _ might _ have overtaken , but my observations upon the bearings of the centre of the storm and its direction led me to entertain a very strong hope that the rest of the boats had escaped . This being so , I determined to act upon the assumption that they had done so , and to proceed in search of them in the direction where they ought , upon that assumption , to be found .