So, when he was at the helm, Dick Sand did not cease to devour the chart with his eyes.  But he interrogated it in vain; it could not give him the solution of an enigma which, in the situation in which Negoro had placed him, was incomprehensible for him, as it would have been for any one else.

On this day, however, the 26th of March, towards eight o’clock in the morning, an incident of the greatest importance took place.

Hercules, on watch forward, gave this cry: 

“Land! land!”

Dick Sand sprang to the forecastle.  Hercules could not have eyes like a seaman.  Was he not mistaken?

“Land?” cried Dick Sand.

“There,” replied Hercules, showing an almost imperceptible point on the horizon in the northeast.

They hardly heard each other speak in the midst of the roaring of the sea and the sky.

“You have seen the land?” said the novice.

“Yes,” replied Hercules.

And his hand was still stretched out to larboard forward.

The novice looked.  He saw nothing.

At that moment, Mrs. Weldon, who had heard the cry given by Hercules, came up on deck, notwithstanding her promise not to come there.

“Madam!” cried Dick Sand.

Mrs. Weldon, unable to make herself heard, tried, for herself, to perceive that land signaled by the black, and she seemed to have concentrated all her life in her eyes.

It must be believed that Hercules’s hand indicated badly the point of the horizon which he wished to show:  neither Mrs. Weldon nor the novice could see anything.

But, suddenly, Dick Sand in turn stretched out his hand.

“Yes! yes! land!” said he.

A kind of summit had just appeared in an opening in the fog.  His sailor’s eyes could not deceive him.

“At last!” cried he; “at last!”

He clang feverishly to the netting.  Mrs. Weldon, sustained by Hercules, continued to watch that land almost despaired of.

The coast, formed by that high summit, rose at a distance of ten miles to leeward.

The opening being completely made in a breaking of the clouds, they saw it again more distinctly.  Doubtless it was some promontory of the American continent.  The “Pilgrim,” without sails, was not in a condition to head toward it, but it could not fail to make the land there.

That could be only a question of a few hours.  Now, it was eight o’clock in the morning.  Then, very certainly, before noon the “Pilgrim” would be near the land.

At a sign from Dick Sand, Hercules led Mrs. Weldon aft again, for she could not bear up against the violence of the pitching.

The novice remained forward for another instant, then he returned to the helm, near old Tom.

At last, then, he saw that coast, so slowly made, so ardently desired! but it was now with a feeling of terror.

In fact, in the “Pilgrim’s” present condition, that is to say, scudding before the tempest, land to leeward, was shipwreck with all its terrible contingencies.