midnight
To add to his anxiety , it was about two bells in the first dog-watch before he could bring the ship to the wind , and he feared , not without reason , that it would be dark before he could work back near enough to the spot at which we had left the boats , to see them again -- always supposing , of course , that they still floated . However , he did everything that a seaman could do , sending a hand aloft to the royal-yard to keep a look-out as soon as the ship had been got upon a wind , and making short boards to windward -- the first one of a quarter of an hour 's duration , and the others of half-an-hour each , so as to thoroughly cover the ground previously passed over -- as long as the daylight lasted . But when , all too soon , the sun went down in a blaze of golden and crimson and purple splendour , no sign of the boats had been seen ; Mendouca , therefore , worked out a calculation of the distance run by the brigantine from the spot where the squall first struck her , subtracted from it the distance that the boats would probably traverse in the same time , and having worked up to this spot as nearly as he could calculate , he hove-to for the night , with a bright lantern at his main-truck , firing signal rockets at intervals of a quarter of an hour , and wearing the ship round on the other tack every two hours . The night was brilliantly star-lit , but without a moon , still there was light enough upon the water to have revealed the boats at a distance of half-a-mile , while the weather was so fine that a shout raised at twice that distance to windward of the ship might have been heard on board her above the soft sigh of the night wind , and the gentle lap of the water along the bends ; moreover , apart from the rockets fired , she might have been plainly seen against the sky at a distance of fully three miles from the boats , while her progress through the water was so slow that they could have pulled alongside her without difficulty ; when , therefore , midnight arrived without any news of them , I gave them up for lost , and turned in . Not so Mendouca , he would not give them up ; moreover , he refused to leave the deck -- declaring that now he had lost his two mates he had nobody on board that he could trust in charge -- preferring to have a mattress laid for him upon the skylight bench , where he snatched catnaps between the intervals of wearing the ship round . However , the matter was cleared up shortly after sunrise next morning , when Mendouca again sent a hand aloft to look round , for the fellow had only got as far as the foretop when he reported two objects that looked like the boats , about five miles to leeward ; adding , that if they _ were _ the boats , they were capsized . The topsail was accordingly filled , and the ship kept away , when , after about an hour 's run , first one boat and then the other was found , the first being capsized , while the second was full of water and floating with the gunwale awash .