Chapter 57 - Ghost Ship

Dense Fog ...

 The milky white fog was boundless, with visibility of less than five meters. For a 30-meter long, 8-meter wide ship, this distance was close to nothing.

 Lorraine felt like she was burrowing into a cloud, with nothing but fog in front of her.

 Where are they? How far are they traveling? Where are they headed?

 The usual precise sense of direction and distance had failed, and even the sense of smell was about to be lost under the stimulation of a faint, if not unmistakable, sulfuric odor.

 The only thing Lorraine could rely on was the compass, which was telling him that they were off to the south.

 Entering the fog zone, the ship involuntarily begins to veer south, and the raging current is so obstinate and stubborn that if you don't turn the rudder according to it, it can turn the whole ship over.

 The wind is weird here too ...

 The Buttercup is clearly right on the edge of the trade wind belt, but the wind here seems scattered and drifting.

 Brigantine's overpowering ability to catch the wind backfired, blowing the ship from side to side and unsettling it for a moment.

 Lorraine had no choice but to lower all the galleys.

 Transverse sail, longitudinal sail, wind catching sail, bowsprit, with only one of the four bowsprits remaining, attached to the sail control pole, with Keren himself at the helm of the sail, catching the wind manually.

 The Buttercup is propelled almost exclusively by ocean currents.

 But even then, Lorraine still thought the ship was going too fast, and he decided to take a chance, asking the seepage chamber to hold off on draining.

 He had the sailors draw red and blue lines on the bulkheads to maintain a fill of nearly half the chamber, draining from the blue line and never allowing the water level to reach the red line.

 This gave the Buttercup 140-160 tons of seawater injected into it alone, and it was easy to reach out the gun doors and touch the seawater.

 The danger of sinking the boat was self-evident, and the sailors began to pray to God.

 Lorraine has no faith to pray to ...

 The faith of his last life had not yet been born in this one, and the faith of this one was under the sea, ready to welcome every sailor to the hospitable drowning of Nooton.

 It's not like he's crazy to nag Nyold at this point.

 Heaven walks, and a gentleman is a self-starter.

 Perhaps because people's brains are extraordinarily active when they are trying to save themselves, Lorraine suddenly came up with a great idea ...

 He did what he said he would do, and had the sailors quintuple Yacharin, who was familiar with the sea and adept at the helm, to the tip of the bowsprit, creating a makeshift human bow statue.

 Acharin shivered and reluctantly made the eyes and mouth of the Buttercup, and a full twenty sailors lined up in a long row from bow to stern, becoming the link between him, Kron and Lorraine.

 It was not until then that the fear of walking by the frying pan and skidding on the grindstone gradually dissipated from the hearts of the sailors.

 It's only a matter of time before they get out of the fog zone, and as long as the compass isn't broken, they'll never become wandering ...

 "Ghost ship!" Yacharin suddenly let out a mournful scream, "Left full rudder! Full rudder!"

 Lorraine hit the tiller wheel to the bottom without thinking.

 The Buttercup slowly turned sideways, and only when it had turned 15 degrees, a silhouette of a ship silently ripped out of the fog, gently crashing into the bow side of the Buttercup and sliding away with only a slight bump.

 The two ships rubbed side to side, hull to hull squeezing and grinding with a clacking, ear-splitting clatter.

 Lorraine snapped and blessed, "Throw the ropes! Gangway!"

 When he finished, he jammed the tiller wheel, picked up the port side cable and jumped straight over.

 Ka-la-la!

 The half-rotten deck emitted a series of fine bursts, Lorraine bent down and opened her hands, not daring to move for fear of overly large movements directly stepping on the deck to collapse.

 But the sailors still made no move.

 Seeing that the two ships were about to end up rubbing sides, the lithe Hina slid down from the lookout and leaped straight for the gangway with Noa in tow. Pierce and Kron also dropped the task at hand and threw out cables and hooks to hang on to the boards.

 As if in a dream, the sailors wrapped the cables, tied knots, and finally tied the two ships back together again.

 Lorraine breathed a long sigh of relief, tossed the cable in her hand to Haina, and whispered, "Tie the mainmast, not too tightly ..."

 After nearly half an hour of busy work, the two boats were finally locked together tightly, and Lorraine tried to walk around a bit, the oak planking could still support it, it just needed to be careful, especially with the seams and stubble.

 This is a two-masted Caravelle, about 20 meters long and 6 meters wide, with Latin sails fore and aft being her biggest difference from other multimasted ships.

 Historically, the Caravelle type was a great Portuguese design that took the world by storm with Portugal's maritime heyday and faded as the small country fell into second-rate obscurity.

 Since the Geelen replaced the Karak as the ocean-going brigantine of choice, it has been difficult to see these nimble, stable but lackluster multi-masted sailing ships on the sea.

 Like this one at Lorraine's feet.

 The rotting blackened planks, the shredded canvas, and the rusted small-caliber guns on the gun deck and the scattered ghastly and desperate bones all told Lorraine that she was a hundred, if not hundreds, of years old ship.

 The ship naturally saw no life.

 There were no living people, no ghosts, and the only thing that passed by was a thin, light cracking that went on and on, announcing the end of the ship's life.

 The ship was no longer serviceable, her decay went far beyond the outside, even the keys like the core and keel hadn't escaped the years.

 Lorraine's thoughts of repairing the ship on the spot were dashed, so she could only continue deeper with the idea of exploring the coffin.

 He went down to the bilge first with Hina and Noa, prying open the bottom deck to see the dark pebbles of the ballast.

 This shows that the ship is not a pirate ship, pirate ships are accustomed to robbed gold and silver ballast, and can be used hundreds of years ago this big ship pirates, hands of gold and silver will certainly not be less.

 They went back into the transom and looked at the cabin from the bottom up.

 Most of the contents of the hatch were decayed, and had spent time with their white-boned owners, and only a few remained intact.

 Lorraine found an unusually well sealed nautical tetradrachm, an antique astrolabe encased in oilcloth and facecloth, with the name of the maker or user engraved on the carved and gilded brass columns.

 Harvey Budden. Harvey Baden.

 "A Spanish navigator ...," said Lorraine, turning the cabin over carefully, and saying with a sense of relief, "I think I have a rough guess as to why they are lost in this modest fog area."

 "Why?"

 Haina wasn't too keen on such questions, and asked while removing the beautifully shaped sailor's knife from the wall.

 Only a click was heard as she drew only the hilt, leaving the blade in its sheath.

 Seeing her depressed appearance, Lorraine couldn't help but lose her voice in laughter.

 "This is the navigator's cabin, but there is no compass."

 "Where's their compass?"

 "Maybe it was damaged, maybe it was lost. Anyway they were lost in the fog and forced to be trapped in the middle of the ocean currents, until now, as ghosts."

 Hina dropped the rotten knife in her hand, "Why don't they use the tetrometer?"

 "It's just daytime now." Lorraine regretfully pointed overhead, "No sun during the day, no stars at night. The reason this latitude measuring device was carefully put away was not because it was valuable, but because it was helpless."

 "Also too dead ..."

 "Captain!" Noa's surprised voice came from next door, abruptly interrupting Hina, "Get over here! I found the nautical diary!"