There are captains and captains, and some mighty fine captains, Iknow; but the run of the captains on the Snark has been remarkably otherwise.My experience with them has been that it is harder to take care of one captain on a small boat than of two small babies.
Of course, this is no more than is to be expected.The good men have positions, and are not likely to forsake their one-thousand-to-fifteen-thousand-ton billets for the Snark with her ten tons net.
The Snark has had to cull her navigators from the beach, and the navigator on the beach is usually a congenital inefficient--the sort of man who beats about for a fortnight trying vainly to find an ocean isle and who returns with his schooner to report the island sunk with all on board, the sort of man whose temper or thirst for strong waters works him out of billets faster than he can work into them.
The Snark has had three captains, and by the grace of God she shall have no more.The first captain was so senile as to be unable to give a measurement for a boom-jaw to a carpenter.So utterly agedly helpless was he, that he was unable to order a sailor to throw a few buckets of salt water on the Snark's deck.For twelve days, at anchor, under an overhead tropic sun, the deck lay dry.It was a new deck.It cost me one hundred and thirty-five dollars to recaulk it.The second captain was angry.He was born angry."Papa is always angry," was the description given him by his half-breed son.
The third captain was so crooked that he couldn't hide behind a corkscrew.The truth was not in him, common honesty was not in him, and he was as far away from fair play and square-dealing as he was from his proper course when he nearly wrecked the Snark on the Ring-gold Isles.
It was at Suva, in the Fijis, that I discharged my third and last captain and took up gain the role of amateur navigator.I had essayed it once before, under my first captain, who, out of San Francisco, jumped the Snark so amazingly over the chart that Ireally had to find out what was doing.It was fairly easy to find out, for we had a run of twenty-one hundred miles before us.I knew nothing of navigation; but, after several hours of reading up and half an hour's practice with the sextant, I was able to find the Snark's latitude by meridian observation and her longitude by the simple method known as "equal altitudes." This is not a correct method.It is not even a safe method, but my captain was attempting to navigate by it, and he was the only one on board who should have been able to tell me that it was a method to be eschewed.I brought the Snark to Hawaii, but the conditions favoured me.The sun was in northern declination and nearly overhead.The legitimate "chronometer-sight" method of ascertaining the longitude I had not heard of--yes, I had heard of it.My first captain mentioned it vaguely, but after one or two attempts at practice of it he mentioned it no more.
I had time in the Fijis to compare my chronometer with two other chronometers.Two weeks previous, at Pago Pago, in Samoa, I had asked my captain to compare our chronometer with the chronometers on the American cruiser, the Annapolis.This he told me he had done--of course he had done nothing of the sort; and he told me that the difference he had ascertained was only a small fraction of a second.
He told it to me with finely simulated joy and with words of praise for my splendid time-keeper.I repeat it now, with words of praise for his splendid and unblushing unveracity.For behold, fourteen days later, in Suva, I compared the chronometer with the one on the Atua, an Australian steamer, and found that mine was thirty-one seconds fast.Now thirty-one seconds of time, converted into arc, equals seven and one-quarter miles.That is to say, if I were sailing west, in the night-time, and my position, according to my dead reckoning from my afternoon chronometer sight, was shown to be seven miles off the land, why, at that very moment I would be crashing on the reef.Next I compared my chronometer with Captain Wooley's.Captain Wooley, the harbourmaster, gives the time to Suva, firing a gun signal at twelve, noon, three times a week.
According to his chronometer mine was fifty-nine seconds fast, which is to say, that, sailing west, I should be crashing on the reef when I thought I was fifteen miles off from it.
I compromised by subtracting thirty-one seconds from the total of my chronometer's losing error, and sailed away for Tanna, in the New Hebrides, resolved, when nosing around the land on dark nights, to bear in mind the other seven miles I might be out according to Captain Wooley's instrument.Tanna lay some six hundred miles west-southwest from the Fijis, and it was my belief that while covering that distance I could quite easily knock into my head sufficient navigation to get me there.Well, I got there, but listen first to my troubles.Navigation IS easy, I shall always contend that; but when a man is taking three gasolene engines and a wife around the world and is writing hard every day to keep the engines supplied with gasolene and the wife with pearls and volcanoes, he hasn't much time left in which to study navigation.Also, it is bound to be easier to study said science ashore, where latitude and longitude are unchanging, in a house whose position never alters, than it is to study navigation on a boat that is rushing along day and night toward land that one is trying to find and which he is liable to find disastrously at a moment when he least expects it.
