The lagoon emptied on the south into the Momba River, which twisted and turned like so many S’s to the sea; on the north was the passage by which we had come, that which led to the sea by way of the bar.  But there was to be no crossing of the bar for us that night.  Ten miles inland we had smelled that sea-breeze and knew what it meant; but Captain Blaise, nevertheless, held on with the Bess toward the bar.  We could hear their crews paddling off and shouting their messages of our progress until they were forced by the breakers to go ashore.  Their parting triumphant shouts was their word of our sure intent to attempt the passage of the bar.

When all was quiet from their direction, we put back to the lagoon and headed for the river passage.  But one ship of any size had ventured this river passage in a generation, and the planking of that one, the brig Orion, for years lay on the bank by way of a warning.  “But the Orion was no Dancing Bess,” commented Captain Blaise.  Surely not, nor was her master a Captain Blaise.

The top spars of the Bess had been slung while we were ashore, and by this time we had also knocked away the ugly and hindering false work on bow and stern, so that with her lifting foreyards which would have done for a sloop-of-war, and on her driving fore and aft sails which could have served the mizzen of a two-thousand-ton bark, the Bess was now herself again.  And she had need to be for the work before her.

Captain Blaise ordered her foresails brailed in to the mast to windward and her foreyards braced flat, this that she might sail closer to the wind.

Entering the narrow passage, she was held to the edge of the low but steep bank to windward; so close that where the low-lying reeds grew outward we could hear them swishing against her sides as we passed on.

Miss Cunningham, having seen her father comfortably established with Ubbo in the cabin, had come on deck, and Captain Blaise, busy though he was, took time to make her welcome.  No need for him to boast of his seamanship—­the whole coast could tell her that; but how often had a beautiful girl a chance to see the proof of it?

We followed the curve of the river’s bank almost as the running stream itself.  When we came to a sharp-jutting point, Captain Blaise himself, or me to the wheel, would let her fall away until her jib-boom lay over the opposite bank; and then, her sails well filled, it was shoot her up into the wind and past the point before us.  Twenty times we had to weather a point of land in that fashion.  Fill and shoot, fill and shoot, never a foot too soon, never a foot too late—­it was a beautiful exhibition, and only a pity it was not light for her to see it better.

We were clear of the river at last; that is, we were in the river’s V-shaped mouth, the delta.  The south bank extended westerly, two miles or so farther to the sea, and the other bank north-westerly toward Momba Bar.  Now we were able to get a view of the coast line, and northward to beyond the bar it was an almost unbroken line, we could see, of lights flaring from high points along the shore.