Off we all sailed, and reached the neighbourhood of the Cape without encountering anything in the way of an adventure; there, however, commenced the disasters of the unfortunate Arniston, as this transport was called.  She had no chronometer on board; a most culpable and preposterous omission in the outfit of a ship destined for such a voyage.  The master told me that he himself was not in circumstances to purchase so expensive an instrument, the cost of a good chronometer being at least fifty or sixty guineas, and that the owners considered the expense needless.  He also stated that on his remonstrating still more, and urging upon these gentlemen that their property would be ten times more secure if he were furnished with the most approved means of taking good care of it, he was given to understand, that, if he did not choose to take the ship to sea without a chronometer, another captain could easily be found who would make no such new-fangled scruples.  The poor master shrugged his shoulders, and said he would do his best; but having often rounded the Cape, he knew the difficulties of the navigation, when there was nothing but the dead reckoning to trust to.

During our passage from Ceylon, it was the practice every day, at one o’clock, for the Indiamen, as well as the men-of-war, to make signals showing the longitude of each ship by chronometer.  Thus we had all an opportunity of comparing the going of our respective time-keepers, and thus, too, the master of the Arniston was enabled to learn his place so accurately, that if he had only kept company with his friends the Indiamen, each of whom was provided with at least four or five chronometers, the deficiency in his equipment might never have led to the dreadful catastrophe which speedily followed the loss of this assistance.

It was late in the month of May when we reached the tempestuous regions of the Cape; and we were not long there before a furious gale of wind from the westward dispersed the fleet, and set every one adrift upon his own resources.  The poor Arniston was seen at sunset, on the day the gale commenced, with most of her sails split, but not otherwise in danger, for she had a good offing, and the wind was not blowing on shore.  Three heavy gales followed in such quick succession during the next week, that not only the ordinary course, but the velocity of the current was changed, and instead of running, as it almost always does, to the westward, it set, on the days in question, to the south-eastward.  According to the most moderate allowance for the current, all circumstances being taken into consideration, any navigator might fairly have supposed that, in the five days which elapsed from the 24th of May to the 28th inclusive, his ship would have been drifted to the westward by the current at least a hundred miles.  Our chronometers, however, distinctly showed us that we had been carried, not, as usual, to the westward, but actually to the eastward, a distance of more than a hundred miles; so that, in less than a week, there occurred upwards of two hundred miles of error in the dead reckoning.