On the contrary, he kept his vessel well away to leeward, shaping a course for Saint Christopher's, so as to pass afterwards through the Anegada Channel, between the Virgin Islands, and reach the ocean in that way.

In other words, following the example of the ready-witted Irishman who drove an obstinate pig to market by pulling him back by the tail, he deliberately steered to the north-west while really wanting to go to the north-east.
But, circuitous as such a route looked, the captain was in the end a gainer by it; for, not only did he keep the wind well abeam of the ship all the way on the starboard tack, but he had the additional advantage of having the strong north-westerly current in his favour in lieu of trying to work against it.
During this portion of our voyage the weather was beautifully fine, the sky being of a clear transparent opal tint without a cloud and the sea of the purest ultramarine blue, with little merry dancing wavelets occasionally flecking its changing surface into foam.
The air, too, was balmy, and not unpleasantly warm, a fine healthy breeze blowing, which filled our good ship's sails, so that they expanded to the furthest limits of the bolt-ropes, speeding her on her way at the rate of some eight knots an hour, as rising and falling she surged through the sparkling water and left a foaming wake astern that spread out in the shape of a fan behind her track, widening until it was lost in the distance.
When I mentioned my going to visit the _Josephine_ as she lay at anchor while taking in cargo at Grenville Bay, I think I said that I had never before been in a vessel.

This, however, was not strictly accurate, for when dad came out to the West Indies from England with my mother and sisters some few years previously, I, of course, accompanied them; and as we had to cross the Atlantic in order to reach Grenada, and there was no other mode of overcoming the three thousand odd miles of ocean that lay between us and our destination except by our adventuring the passage in the ordinary way, I was then really for the first time taken on board a ship.

But it must be remembered that I was only at that period a tiny baby about the size of my little sister Tot; and, therefore, my recollections of the time being rather hazy, my first real experiences of the sea and all the incidents of the voyage came upon me with all that novelty and interest which unfamiliarity alone can produce.

It is, nevertheless, only right that I should make this correction of my former mis-statement, for I wish to give a true and impartial account of all that happened to me from first to last.