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.
To begin with, there are the compasses and the setting of the
courses. We sailed from Suva on Saturday afternoon, June 6, 1908,
and it took us till after dark to run the narrow, reef-ridden
passage between the islands of Viti Levu and Mbengha.
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