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.
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