midday
She was a splendid craft of her kind , measuring thirty feet in length , with a beam of six feet , and she pulled six oars . She was a most beautiful model of the whale-boat type , double-ended , with quite an unusual amount of sheer fore and aft , which gave her a fine , bold , buoyant bow and stern ; moreover , these were covered in with light turtle-back decks , that forward measuring six feet in length , while the after turtle-back measured five feet from the stern-post . She was fitted with a keel nine inches deep amidships , tapering off to four inches deep at each end ; was rigged as a schooner , with standing fore and main lug and a small jib , and , with her ordinary crew on board and sitting to windward , required no ballast even in a fresh breeze . Small wonder , therefore , was it that , having such a boat under us , we had run the rest of the fleet out of sight by midday , the wind still blowing strong , although it was moderating rapidly . The first lieutenant was , like the captain , fond of inventing and designing things , but his speciality took the form of logs for determining the speed of craft through the water ; and in the course of his experiments he had provided each of the frigate 's boats with an ingenious spring arrangement which , attached to an ordinary fishing-line with a lead weight secured to its outer end , which was continuously towed astern , registered the speed of the boat with a very near approach to perfect accuracy . The day passed uneventfully away , the wind moderating steadily all the time , and the sun breaking through considerably before noon , enabling me to secure a meridian altitude wherefrom to compute my latitude . The sea , too , was going down , and when the sun set that night the sky wore a very promising fine-weather aspect .