They reckoned she would founder in a few minutes.

But there was one old man on board, the boatswain, who had seen many years at sea, who said that she wasn't making any water at all, because he had been told to look for the leak and couldn't find it.

He said that the water had been pumped into her so as to waterlog her; and it was his belief that she had not been abandoned many minutes, that the crew were hanging about somewhere near in a boat waiting to see if we sighted her and put men on board." Mr.Dormer Colville was attending to the claret, and pressed Captain Clubbe by a gesture of the hand to empty his glass.
"Something wrong somewhere ?" he suggested, in a conversational way.
"By daylight we were ramping up channel with three French men-of-war after us," was Captain Clubbe's comprehensive reply.

"As chance had it, the channel squadron hove in sight round the Foreland, and the Frenchmen turned and left us." Clubbe marked a pause in his narrative by a glass of claret taken at one draught like beer.
"Skipper was a Farlingford man, name of Doy," he continued.

"Long as he lived he was pestered by inquiries from the French government respecting a Dieppe fishing-smack supposed to have been picked up abandoned at sea.
He had picked up no fishing-smack, and he answered no letters about it.
He was an old man when it happened, and he died at sea soon after my indentures expired.