The Cruise of the Snark

Heavens! The Snark’s time was not as good as Greenwich time. When it was 8:25 at Greenwich, on board the Snark it was only 8:9. “Greenwich time best, longitude west.” There I was. In west longitude beyond a doubt.

“Silly!” cries my literal mind. “You are 8:9 A.M. and Greenwich is 8:25 P.M.”

“Very well,” answers my logical mind. “To be correct, 8.25 P.M. is really twenty hours and twenty-five minutes, and that is certainly better than eight hours and nine minutes. No, there is no discussion; you are in west longitude.”

Then my literal mind triumphs.

“We sailed from Suva, in the Fijis, didn’t we?” it demands, and logical mind agrees. “And Suva is in east longitude?” Again logical mind agrees. “And we sailed west (which would take us deeper into east longitude), didn’t we? Therefore, and you can’t escape it, we are in east longitude.”

“Greenwich time best, longitude west,” chants my logical mind; “and you must grant that twenty hours and twenty-five minutes is better than eight hours and nine minutes.”

“All right,” I break in upon the squabble; “we’ll work up the sight and then we’ll see.”

And work it up I did, only to find that my longitude was 184° west.

“I told you so,” snorts my logical mind.

I am dumbfounded. So is my literal mind, for several minutes. Then it enounces:

“But there is no 184° west longitude, nor east longitude, nor any other longitude. The largest meridian is 180° as you ought to know very well.”

Having got this far, literal mind collapses from the brain strain, logical mind is dumb flabbergasted; and as for me, I get a bleak and wintry look in my eyes and go around wondering whether I am sailing toward the China coast or the Gulf of Darien.

Then a thin small voice, which I do not recognize, coming from nowhere in particular in my consciousness, says:

“The total number of degrees is 360. Subtract the 184° west longitude from 360°, and you will get 176° east longitude.”

“That is sheer speculation,” objects literal mind; and logical mind remonstrates. “There is no rule for it.”

“Darn the rules!” I exclaim. “Ain’t I here?”

“The thing is self-evident,” I continue. “184° west longitude means a lapping over in east longitude of four degrees. Besides I have been in east longitude all the time. I sailed from Fiji, and Fiji is in east longitude. Now I shall chart my position and prove it by dead reckoning.”

But other troubles and doubts awaited me. Here is a sample of one. In south latitude, when the sun is in northern declination, chronometer sights may be taken early in the morning. I took mine at eight o’clock. Now, one of the necessary elements in working up such a sight is latitude. But one gets latitude at twelve o’clock, noon, by a meridian observation. It is clear that in order to work up my eight o’clock chronometer sight I must have my eight o’clock latitude. Of course, if the Snark were sailing due west at six knots per hour, for the intervening four hours her latitude would not change. But if she were sailing due south, her latitude would change to the tune of twenty-four miles. In which case a simple addition or subtraction would convert the twelve o’clock latitude into eight o’clock latitude. But suppose the Snark were sailing southwest. Then the traverse tables must be consulted.

This is the illustration. At eight A.M. I took my chronometer sight. At the same moment the distance recorded on the log was noted. At twelve M., when the sight for latitude was taken. I again noted the log, which showed me that since eight o’clock the Snark had run 24 miles. Her true course had been west ¾ south. I entered Table I, in the distance column, on the page for ¾ point courses, and stopped at 24, the number of miles run. Opposite, in the next two columns, I found that the Snark had made 3.5 miles of southing or latitude, and that she had made 23.7 miles of westing. To find my eight o’clock’ latitude was easy. I had but to subtract 3.5 miles from my noon latitude. All the elements being present, I worked up my longitude.

But this was my eight o’clock longitude. Since then, and up till noon, I had made 23.7 miles of westing. What was my noon longitude? I followed the rule, turning to Traverse Table No. II. Entering the table, according to rule, and going through every detail, according to rule, I found the difference of longitude for the four hours to be 25 miles. I was aghast. I entered the table again, according to rule; I entered the table half a dozen times, according to rule, and every time found that my difference of longitude was 25 miles. I leave it to you, gentle reader. Suppose you had sailed 24 miles and that you had covered 3.5 miles of latitude, then how could you have covered 25 miles of longitude? Even if you had sailed due west 24 miles, and not changed your latitude, how could you have changed your longitude 25 miles? In the name of human reason, how could you cover one mile more of longitude than the total number of miles you had sailed?

It was a reputable traverse table, being none other than Bowditch’s. The rule was simple (as navigators’ rules go); I had made no error. I spent an hour over it, and at the end still faced the glaring impossibility of having sailed 24 miles, in the course of which I changed my latitude 3.5 miles and my longitude 25 miles. The worst of it was that there was nobody to help me out. Neither Charmian nor Martin knew as much as I knew about navigation. And all the time the Snark was rushing madly along toward Tanna, in the New Hebrides. Something had to be done.

How it came to me I know not – call it an inspiration if you will; but the thought arose in me: if southing is latitude, why isn’t westing longitude? Why should I have to change westing into longitude? And then the whole beautiful situation dawned upon me. The meridians of longitude are 60 miles (nautical) apart at the equator. At the poles they run together. Thus, if I should travel up the 180° meridian of longitude until I reached the North Pole, and if the astronomer at Greenwich travelled up the 0 meridian of longitude to the North Pole, then, at the North Pole, we could shake hands with each other, though before we started for the North Pole we had been some thousands of miles apart. Again: if a degree of longitude was 60 miles wide at the equator, and if the same degree, at the point of the Pole, had no width, then somewhere between the Pole and the equator that degree would be half a mile wide, and at other places a mile wide, two miles wide, ten miles wide, thirty miles wide, ay, and sixty miles wide.

All was plain again. The Snark was in 19° south latitude. The world wasn’t as big around there as at the equator. Therefore, every mile of westing at 19° south was more than a minute of longitude; for sixty miles were sixty miles, but sixty minutes are sixty miles only at the equator. George Francis Train broke Jules Verne’s record of around the world. But any man that wants can break George Francis Train’s record. Such a man would need only to go, in a fast steamer, to the latitude of Cape Horn, and sail due east all the way around. The world is very small in that latitude, and there is no land in the way to turn him out of his course. If his steamer maintained sixteen knots, he would circumnavigate the globe in just about forty days.

But there are compensations. On Wednesday evening, June 10, I brought up my noon position by dead reckoning to eight P.M. Then I projected the Snark’s course and saw that she would strike Futuna, one of the easternmost of the New Hebrides, a volcanic cone two thousand feet high that rose out of the deep ocean. I altered the course so that the Snark would pass ten miles to the northward. Then I spoke to Wada, the cook, who had the wheel every morning from four to six.

“Wada San, to-morrow morning, your watch, you look sharp on weather-bow you see land.”

And then I went to bed. The die was cast. I had staked my reputation as a navigator. Suppose, just suppose, that at daybreak there was no land. Then, where would my navigation be? And where would we be? And how would we ever find ourselves? or find any land? I caught ghastly visions of the Snark sailing for months through ocean solitudes and seeking vainly for land while we consumed our provisions and sat down with haggard faces to stare cannibalism in the face.

I confess my sleep was not

“.. like a summer sky
That held the music of a lark.”

Rather did “I waken to the voiceless dark,” and listen to the creaking of the bulkheads and the rippling of the sea alongside as the Snark logged steadily her six knots an hour. I went over my calculations again and again, striving to find some mistake, until my brain was in such fever that it discovered dozens of mistakes. Suppose, instead of being sixty miles off Futuna, that my navigation was all wrong and that I was only six miles off? In which case my course would be wrong, too, and for all I knew the Snark might be running straight at Futuna. For all I knew the Snark might strike Futuna the next moment. I almost sprang from the bunk at that thought; and, though I restrained myself, I know that I lay for a moment, nervous and tense, waiting for the shock.

My sleep was broken by miserable nightmares. Earthquake seemed the favourite affliction, though there was one man, with a bill, who persisted in dunning me throughout the night. Also, he wanted to fight; and Charmian continually persuaded me to let him alone. Finally, however, the man with the everlasting dun ventured into a dream from which Charmian was absent. It was my opportunity, and we went at it, gloriously, all over the sidewalk and street, until he cried enough. Then I said, “Now how about that bill?” Having conquered, I was willing to pay. But the man looked at me and groaned. “It was all a mistake,” he said; “the bill is for the house next door.”

That settled him, for he worried my dreams no more; and it settled me, too, for I woke up chuckling at the episode. It was three in the morning. I went up on deck. Henry, the Rapa islander, was steering. I looked at the log. It recorded forty-two miles. The Snark had not abated her six-knot gait, and she had not struck Futuna yet. At half-past five I was again on deck. Wada, at the wheel, had seen no land. I sat on the cockpit rail, a prey to morbid doubt for a quarter of an hour. Then I saw land, a small, high piece of land, just where it ought to be, rising from the water on the weather-bow. At six o’clock I could clearly make it out to be the beautiful volcanic cone of Futuna. At eight o’clock, when it was abreast, I took its distance by the sextant and found it to be 9.3 miles away. And I had elected to pass it 10 miles away!

Then, to the south, Aneiteum rose out of the sea, to the north, Aniwa, and, dead ahead, Tanna. There was no mistaking Tanna, for the smoke of its volcano was towering high in the sky. It was forty miles away, and by afternoon, as we drew close, never ceasing to log our six knots, we saw that it was a mountainous, hazy land, with no apparent openings in its coast-line. I was looking for Port Resolution, though I was quite prepared to find that as an anchorage, it had been destroyed. Volcanic earthquakes had lifted its bottom during the last forty years, so that where once the largest ships rode at anchor there was now, by last reports, scarcely space and depth sufficient for the Snark. And why should not another convulsion, since the last report, have closed the harbour completely?

I ran in close to the unbroken coast, fringed with rocks awash upon which the crashing trade-wind sea burst white and high. I searched with my glasses for miles, but could see no entrance. I took a compass bearing of Futuna, another of Aniwa, and laid them off on the chart. Where the two bearings crossed was bound to be the position of the Snark. Then, with my parallel rulers, I laid down a course from the Snark’s position to Port Resolution. Having corrected this course for variation and deviation, I went on deck, and lo, the course directed me towards that unbroken coast-line of bursting seas. To my Rapa islander’s great concern, I held on till the rocks awash were an eighth of a mile away.

“No harbour this place,” he announced, shaking his head ominously.

But I altered the course and ran along parallel with the coast. Charmian was at the wheel. Martin was at the engine, ready to throw on the propeller. A narrow silt of an opening showed up suddenly. Through the glasses I could see the seas breaking clear across. Henry, the Rapa man, looked with troubled eyes; so did Tehei, the Tahaa man.

“No passage, there,” said Henry. “We go there, we finish quick, sure.”

I confess I thought so, too; but I ran on abreast, watching to see if the line of breakers from one side the entrance did not overlap the line from the other side. Sure enough, it did. A narrow place where the sea ran smooth appeared. Charmian put down the wheel and steadied for the entrance. Martin threw on the engine, while all hands and the cook sprang to take in sail.

A trader’s house showed up in the bight of the bay. A geyser, on the shore, a hundred yards away; spouted a column of steam. To port, as we rounded a tiny point, the mission station appeared.

“Three fathoms,” cried Wada at the lead-line. “Three fathoms,” “two fathoms,” came in quick succession.

Charmian put the wheel down, Martin stopped the engine, and the Snark rounded to and the anchor rumbled down in three fathoms. Before we could catch our breaths a swarm of black Tannese was alongside and aboard – grinning, apelike creatures, with kinky hair and troubled eyes, wearing safety-pins and clay-pipes in their slitted ears: and as for the rest, wearing nothing behind and less than that before. And I don’t mind telling that that night, when everybody was asleep, I sneaked up on deck, looked out over the quiet scene, and gloated – yes, gloated – over my navigation.

CHAPTER XV

CRUISING IN THE SOLOMONS

“Why not come along now?” said Captain Jansen to us, at Penduffryn, on the island of Guadalcanar.

Charmian and I looked at each other and debated silently for half a minute. Then we nodded our heads simultaneously. It is a way we have of making up our minds to do things; and a very good way it is when one has no temperamental tears to shed over the last tin-of condensed milk when it has capsized. (We are living on tinned goods these days, and since mind is rumoured to be an emanation of matter, our similes are naturally of the packing-house variety.)

“You’d better bring your revolvers along, and a couple of rifles,” said Captain Jansen. “I’ve got five rifles aboard, though the one Mauser is without ammunition. Have you a few rounds to spare?”

We brought our rifles on board, several handfuls of Mauser cartridges, and Wada and Nakata, the Snark’s cook and cabin-boy respectively. Wada and Nakata were in a bit of a funk. To say the least, they were not enthusiastic, though never did Nakata show the white feather in the face of danger. The Solomon Islands had not dealt kindly with them. In the first place, both had suffered from Solomon sores. So had the rest of us (at the time, I was nursing two fresh ones on a diet of corrosive sublimate); but the two Japanese had had more than their share. And the sores are not nice. They may be described as excessively active ulcers. A mosquito bite, a cut, or the slightest abrasion, serves for lodgment of the poison with which the air seems to be filled. Immediately the ulcer commences to eat. It eats in every direction, consuming skin and muscle with astounding rapidity. The pin-point ulcer of the first day is the size of a dime by the second day, and by the end of the week a silver dollar will not cover it.

Worse than the sores, the two Japanese had been afflicted with Solomon Island fever. Each had been down repeatedly with it, and in their weak, convalescent moments they were wont to huddle together on the portion of the Snark that happened to be nearest to faraway Japan, and to gaze yearningly in that direction.

But worst of all, they were now brought on board the Minota for a recruiting cruise along the savage coast of Malaita. Wada, who had the worse funk, was sure that he would never see Japan again, and with bleak, lack-lustre eyes he watched our rifles and ammunition going on board the Minota. He knew about the Minota and her Malaita cruises. He knew that she had been captured six months before on the Malaita coast, that her captain had been chopped to pieces with tomahawks, and that, according to the barbarian sense of equity on that sweet isle, she owed two more heads. Also, a labourer on Penduffryn Plantation, a Malaita boy, had just died of dysentery, and Wada knew that Penduffryn had been put in the debt of Malaita by one more head. Furthermore, in stowing our luggage away in the skipper’s tiny cabin, he saw the axe gashes on the door where the triumphant bushmen had cut their way in. And, finally, the galley stove was without a pipe – said pipe having been part of the loot.

The Minota was a teak-built, Australian yacht, ketch-rigged, long and lean, with a deep fin-keel, and designed for harbour racing rather than for recruiting blacks. When Charmian and I came on board, we found her crowded. Her double boat’s crew, including substitutes, was fifteen, and she had a score and more of “return” boys, whose time on the plantations was served and who were bound back to their bush villages. To look at, they were certainly true head-hunting cannibals. Their perforated nostrils were thrust through with bone and wooden bodkins the size of lead-pencils. Numbers of them had punctured the extreme meaty point of the nose, from which protruded, straight out, spikes of turtle-shell or of beads strung on stiff wire. A few had further punctured their noses with rows of holes following the curves of the nostrils from lip to point. Each ear of every man had from two to a dozen holes in it – holes large enough to carry wooden plugs three inches in diameter down to tiny holes in which were carried clay-pipes and similar trifles. In fact, so many holes did they possess that they lacked ornaments to fill them; and when, the following day, as we neared Malaita, we tried out our rifles to see that they were in working order, there was a general scramble for the empty cartridges, which were thrust forthwith into the many aching voids in our passengers’ ears.

At the time we tried out our rifles we put up our barbed wire railings. The Minota, crown-decked, without any house, and with a rail six inches high, was too accessible to boarders. So brass stanchions were screwed into the rail and a double row of barbed wire stretched around her from stem to stern and back again. Which was all very well as a protection from savages, but it was mighty uncomfortable to those on board when the Minota took to jumping and plunging in a sea-way. When one dislikes sliding down upon the lee-rail barbed wire, and when he dares not catch hold of the weather-rail barbed wire to save himself from sliding, and when, with these various disinclinations, he finds himself on a smooth flush-deck that is heeled over at an angle of forty-five degrees, some of the delights of Solomon Islands cruising may be comprehended. Also, it must be remembered, the penalty of a fall into the barbed wire is more than the mere scratches, for each scratch is practically certain to become a venomous ulcer. That caution will not save one from the wire was evidenced one fine morning when we were running along the Malaita coast with the breeze on our quarter. The wind was fresh, and a tidy sea was making. A black boy was at the wheel. Captain Jansen, Mr. Jacobsen (the mate), Charmian, and I had just sat down on deck to breakfast. Three unusually large seas caught us. The boy at the wheel lost his head. Three times the Minota was swept. The breakfast was rushed over the lee-rail. The knives and forks went through the scuppers; a boy aft went clean overboard and was dragged back; and our doughty skipper lay half inboard and half out, jammed in the barbed wire. After that, for the rest of the cruise, our joint use of the several remaining eating utensils was a splendid example of primitive communism. On the Eugenie, however, it was even worse, for we had but one teaspoon among four of us – but the Eugenie is another story.