‘How long does the eclipse last?’ asked the subaltern.
‘I believe the disk is less than a quarter obscured,’ replied the captain.
‘That should give time for each division to take a peep,’ exclaimed Captain Barrett.
Here I was sent into the pantry, and lost what followed. I gathered, however, on my return, from what the doctor and the others let fall, that the matter was settled, and that the convicts in divisions, the guard being under arms on the poop, were to be brought up on deck to view the partial eclipse of the moon.
Dinner was over in the cuddy by seven. The captain and military officers went on to the poop to smoke, and I carried coffee to them whilst Frank waited upon Mr. Bates and his brother mate. The doctor, who did not smoke, and who drank his wine well watered, descended the booby-hatch to acquaint the prisoners with his intentions, and to make the necessary arrangements. It was a true tropic night, splendid and silent. Often do I recall that night, and always with a bitter sense of the blindness of the human mind, of our incapacity to see one minute ahead of us. The moon at this hour was rising, and the lunar dawn lay in a streak of dim red along the eastern seaboard. I do not remember the hour; it was not yet eight bells; in the west was a fast-waning flush, for we floated in a part of the ocean where the night crosses the sea in a stride. Not a breath of air! The waters stretched flat as a surface of polished ebony, and only at intervals there ran a sighing sort of movement over the sea, which sent a delicate stir through the canvas, and set the dew raining from aloft in little pattering showers. In the south there was much lightning; the leap of the violet sparks flashed up the battlements and ragged brows of a mass of electric cloud. The water reflected the play, and sometimes a little note of distant thunder came humming across the glass-smooth surface. Elsewhere under the brightest of the stars hung tremulous wakes of silver fire.
Even now, early as it was, the mighty shadow of the ocean night was majestic and awful with the wild, flashful colouring of lightning in the south, and the dustlike multitude of stars over the three glooming spires of our ship, and the rising moon rusty-red and imperfect and distorted, as though lifting heavily through some noxious belt of African river vapour.