In the variables, if you wait long
enough, something is bound to happen, and we were so plentifully
stocked with food and water that we could afford to wait. On
October 26, we actually made one hundred and three miles of easting,
and we talked about it for days afterwards. Once we caught a
moderate gale from the south, which blew itself out in eight hours,
but it helped us to seventy-one miles of easting in that particular
twenty-four hours. And then, just as it was expiring, the wind came
straight out from the north (the directly opposite quarter), and
fanned us along over another degree of easting.
In years and years no sailing vessel has attempted this traverse,
and we found ourselves in the midst of one of the loneliest of the
Pacific solitudes. In the sixty days we were crossing it we sighted
no sail, lifted no steamer's smoke above the horizon. A disabled
vessel could drift in this deserted expanse for a dozen generations,
and there would be no rescue. The only chance of rescue would be
from a vessel like the Snark, and the Snark happened to be there
principally because of the fact that the traverse had been begun
before the particular paragraph in the sailing directions had been
read. Standing upright on deck, a straight line drawn from the eye
to the horizon would measure three miles and a half. Thus, seven
miles was the diameter of the circle of the sea in which we had our
centre.
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