Then we
began to train our sextants rather wildly all around the horizon,
and wherever we looked, there was the sun, puzzlingly close to the
sky-line, sometimes above it and sometimes below it. In one
direction the sun was proclaiming morning, in another direction it
was proclaiming afternoon. The sun was all right - we knew that;
therefore we were all wrong. And the rest of the afternoon we spent
in the cockpit reading up the matter in the books and finding out
what was wrong. We missed the observation that day, but we didn't
the next. We had learned.
And we learned well, better than for a while we thought we had. At
the beginning of the second dog-watch one evening, Charmian and I
sat down on the forecastle-head for a rubber of cribbage. Chancing
to glance ahead, I saw cloud-capped mountains rising from the sea.
We were rejoiced at the sight of land, but I was in despair over our
navigation. I thought we had learned something, yet our position at
noon, plus what we had run since, did not put us within a hundred
miles of land. But there was the land, fading away before our eyes
in the fires of sunset. The land was all right. There was no
disputing it. Therefore our navigation was all wrong. But it
wasn't. That land we saw was the summit of Haleakala, the House of
the Sun, the greatest extinct volcano in the world. It towered ten
thousand feet above the sea, and it was all of a hundred miles away.
We sailed all night at a seven-knot clip, and in the morning the
House of the Sun was still before us, and it took a few more hours
of sailing to bring it abreast of us. "That island is Maui," we
said, verifying by the chart. "That next island sticking out is
Molokai, where the lepers are. And the island next to that is Oahu.
There is Makapuu Head now. We'll be in Honolulu to-morrow. Our
navigation is all right."
CHAPTER V - THE FIRST LANDFALL
"It will not be so monotonous at sea," I promised my fellow-voyagers
on the Snark. "The sea is filled with life. It is so populous that
every day something new is happening. Almost as soon as we pass
through the Golden Gate and head south we'll pick up with the flying
fish. We'll be having them fried for breakfast. We'll be catching
bonita and dolphin, and spearing porpoises from the bowsprit. And
then there are the sharks - sharks without end."
We passed through the Golden Gate and headed south. We dropped the
mountains of California beneath the horizon, and daily the surf grew
warmer. But there were no flying fish, no bonita and dolphin. The
ocean was bereft of life.
