about ten a.m.
The remainder of the day I devoted to the task of pumping the ship dry . The two succeeding days were quite devoid of incident ; the weather held fine , and the wind so light that the brig made barely three knots in the hour , on a taut bowline ; there was nothing particular to do , for the small air of wind that continued to blow hung obstinately at east , and we were still driving slowly south , the vessel steering herself . Under these circumstances , as I was daily growing increasingly anxious to fall in with a sail of some sort that would take us off , and convey us to a civilised port , or even lend me a few hands to help in carrying the brig to Cape Town , I spent pretty nearly the whole of the day in the main-topmast crosstrees , from whence I could obtain the most extended view possible , and perhaps be thus able to intercept some craft that would otherwise slip past us unseen . On the third day after my raid upon the cargo I was aloft as usual -- the hour being about ten a.m. , -- while Miss Onslow was busy in and out of the galley . The ship was creeping along at a speed of about two and a half knots , when , slowly and carefully sweeping the horizon afresh with the telescope , after a rather long spell of meditation upon how this adventure was likely to end , a small , hazy-looking , ill-defined object swam into the field of the instrument . The object was about one point before the weather beam , and was so far away that the rarefaction of the air imparted to it a wavering indistinctness of aspect that rendered it quite unrecognisable . The fact , however , that it was visible at all in the slightly hazy atmosphere led me to estimate its distance from the brig as about ten miles , while , from its apparent size , it might be either a boat , a raft , or a piece of floating wreckage .