"But," our friends objected, "how dare you go to sea without a
navigator on board?
You're not a navigator, are you?"
I had to confess that I was not a navigator, that I had never looked
through a sextant in my life, and that I doubted if I could tell a
sextant from a nautical almanac. And when they asked if Roscoe was
a navigator, I shook my head. Roscoe resented this. He had glanced
at the "Epitome," bought for our voyage, knew how to use logarithm
tables, had seen a sextant at some time, and, what of this and of
his seafaring ancestry, he concluded that he did know navigation.
But Roscoe was wrong, I still insist. When a young boy he came from
Maine to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and that was
the only time in his life that he was out of sight of land. He had
never gone to a school of navigation, nor passed an examination in
the same; nor had he sailed the deep sea and learned the art from
some other navigator. He was a San Francisco Bay yachtsman, where
land is always only several miles away and the art of navigation is
never employed.
So the Snark started on her long voyage without a navigator. We
beat through the Golden Gate on April 23, and headed for the
Hawaiian Islands, twenty-one hundred sea-miles away as the gull
flies. And the outcome was our justification. We arrived. And we
arrived, furthermore, without any trouble, as you shall see; that
is, without any trouble to amount to anything. To begin with,
Roscoe tackled the navigating. He had the theory all right, but it
was the first time he had ever applied it, as was evidenced by the
erratic behaviour of the Snark. Not but what the Snark was
perfectly steady on the sea; the pranks she cut were on the chart.
On a day with a light breeze she would make a jump on the chart that
advertised "a wet sail and a flowing sheet," and on a day when she
just raced over the ocean, she scarcely changed her position on the
chart. Now when one's boat has logged six knots for twenty-four
consecutive hours, it is incontestable that she has covered one
hundred and forty-four miles of ocean. The ocean was all right, and
so was the patent log; as for speed, one saw it with his own eyes.
Therefore the thing that was not all right was the figuring that
refused to boost the Snark along over the chart. Not that this
happened every day, but that it did happen. And it was perfectly
proper and no more than was to be expected from a first attempt at
applying a theory.
The acquisition of the knowledge of navigation has a strange effect
on the minds of men. The average navigator speaks of navigation
with deep respect. To the layman navigation is a deed and awful
mystery, which feeling has been generated in him by the deep and
awful respect for navigation that the layman has seen displayed by
navigators.
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