Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 23, 2010 at 12:41:19 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Here we go again; Best books and why? posted by Peter Ceresole on February 22, 2010 at 16:49:19:
I have had recourse to "The Oxford Companion to Ships and The Sea":
"PIERHEAD JUMP, an expression indicative of joining a ship at the last possible moment because of a sudden and unexpected appointment to her. Charles Powell, the central character of Joseph Conrad's novel "Chance" entered into a new world of experience with a totally unexpected pierhead jump into the ship "FERNDALE" "
So it appears that the pierhead jump that Commander Walker refers to was not off the Harwich packet, but into the "Goblin":
"Daddy's eyes ran quickly here and there over the rigging and then back to John and Titty and Roger. He did not show that he was surprised in any way. All he said was, "You must tell me about it some time. Lucky I saw you in time to make a pierhead jump the other way. A minute later I couldn't have done it. What do you propose to do now?" " (Chapter XX1, page 276, first edition (thank you, the Oxfam Shop!))
Armed with that information, the scene now makes better sense to me; there was a little time between Daddy's shout of "Ahoy there! JOHN!" and the packet getting under way, during which the packet gave one long blast on her syren, ("four to six seconds" according to the IRPCS) as indeed she should, before getting under way, and then began to shorten up. Say, three minutes, maybe four, in total. That would be just time enough for Daddy to "dodge through" the passengers on the deck and get ashore. He could then have hired a motor boat (for the sake of argument, it could have been the linesmen's boat that had been in attendance whilst the packet was casting off) and got up the inner harbour to the "Goblin" on her buoy.