the sun at noon
Besides thus upsetting my ideas as to the terrible ordeal we had gone through , concerning which , however , I held to my own view in spite of his protest to be contrary , although , of course , I did not tell him so , Mr Gilham informed me that we had suffered no serious damage beyond the injury to the topsail yard . This , he said , too , was much less than Mr Cleete , the carpenter , had made out , that worthy being one of the sort of men who always take a despondent view of everything . The spar , however , was sent down and replaced by a spare yard which we carried ; and everything was all right aloft now . We had lost something in another way , though ; for , when Mr Quadrant took the sun at noon , with all of us youngsters standing round him with our sextants , like a parcel of chickens gathered about an old hen , which indeed the master greatly resembled with his shock head of hair and fussy manner , the ship was found to be in latitude 44 degrees 5 minutes north and longitude 7 degrees 50 minutes west . She had been driven to the south-east by the gale , aided by the drift of the current setting in to the Bay of Biscay . This was more than two hundred miles out of our proper track , and far too much to the eastward to be able to weather the northern extremity of the Spanish coast , which would soon be perilously near to us , running as we then were to the sou ' - sou ' - west . Fortunately for us , though , the wind had now veered to the southward ; and , as we were sailing on the port tack , by giving the ship a good deal of weather helm and bracing round the yards , we were able to bear up to the westward out of the ill-omened bay , steering west by south until we were in longitude 11 degrees 10 minutes west and well clear of Cape Finisterre , when we hauled our wind and shaped a course direct for Madeira .