They found the pilot, Valdemar Svensen, leaning at his ease against the idle wheel, with his face turned towards the eastern sky.

He was a stalwart specimen of Norse manhood, tall and strongly built, with thoughtful, dignified features, and keen, clear hazel eyes.

His chestnut hair, plentifully sprinkled with gray, clustered thickly over a broad brow, that was deeply furrowed with many a line of anxious and speculative thought, and the forcible brown hand that rested lightly on the spokes of the wheel, told its own tale of hard and honest labor.

Neither wife nor child, nor living relative had Valdemar; the one passion of his heart was the sea.

Sir Philip Errington had engaged him at Christiansund, hearing of him there as a man to whom the intricacies of the Fjords, and the dangers of rock-bound coasts, were more familiar than a straight road on dry lake, and since then the management of the _Eulalie_ had been entirely entrusted to him.