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Chapter II headpiece

CHAPTER II

Concerning preparations in general, and personnel in particular

Our separate excursions into the field of commerce resulted in a healthier financial outlook at the next general meeting of dream merchants. Plans developed apace. Lists were made, schedules drawn up. An actual sailing date began to emerge out of a welter of conjecture.

On paper, the dream ship was converted from a work-worn fishing-smack into a cruiser yacht of comfort and elegance within a month, and a trifle under the estimated cost.

On paper, the art of navigation was acquired in our spare time, after the airy fashion of a Correspondence-School advertisement.

And again on paper—a map of the world outspread on the cabin table, to be exact—we actually decided on our route. At the point of an indomitable lead pencil we traversed vast tracts of ocean in the winking of an eye, and explored the furthermost corners of the earth; and if there is a more fascinating evening's entertainment, I should like to hear of it.

Spain should be touched at, for the sake of her wine, if nothing else; perhaps Madeira, and most certainly the Canary Islands. After that, there was the little matter of the Atlantic Ocean, ending in the West Indies. Then came the Caribbean Sea, the Panama Canal, and so down into the milky way of the Pacific. It looked a long way; it was a long way, but we had a ship, and we had a crew, and what was the sea if not the highway of the earth? The enthusiasm of ignorance? Perhaps; yet I am convinced that without the enthusiasm, and most certainly without the ignorance, we should never have set sail, much less won through to our goal.

The transition from fancy to fact was effected the following morning, when Steve and I commenced the soul-racking task of transferring twelve tons of rusty pig-iron from the dream ship's bilge to the quay alongside which we lay. This mass of obstinate metal had to be chipped and painted, and ultimately replaced so that we might disport ourselves on our beam ends, if the elements so willed, without shifting it. It was one of the dream ship's strong points, that her ballast was all "inside." There was no "fin" of lead hanging from her keel, that might come adrift from a multitude of causes, and leave us a tottering hulk. I told Steve this, as we wrestled with two hundredweight pigs, that had a knack of slipping their moorings in mid-air, and crashing through the cabin floor boards, or on to our anatomies with striking impartiality. I told it to him again, as we sat in the rain on the quay, chipping rust into each other's eyes, but received no satisfactory reply on either occasion.

"By the way," was all he said that evening, when, weary and bruised and rusty, we flung ourselves on our bunks, "according to schedule, this is where we study navigation, isn't it?" And for three mortal hours he gave his undivided attention to a nautical epitome. That is the kind of man Steve is.

There is no undertaking that requires a more careful selection of personnel than a cruise such as we contemplated, and no better opportunity of taking a man's measure than when fitting out! By the time it is done, one has either come to the conclusion that the other fellow has his points, or that to remain in his company another hour is beyond endurance. Naturally, his feelings are similar, and that we of the dream ship stood the mutual test seemed to me to augur well for the future.

It was during this trying period that we encountered a peculiarly pernicious type of the genus yachtsman on his native heath. He was owner of a pretty little six-tonner across the creek, and was "fitting out" also—had been for two months, as far as we could gather. The thing was evidently a hobby with him that he infinitely preferred to getting to sea. With a paint pot in one hand, and a camel's hair brush in the other, he advanced on his craft in the manner of an artist attacking a master canvas, applied the pigment, and stood back with his head at an angle to view the effect. In itself there was nothing against this form of amusement, provided that it interfered with no one else; but, evidently tiring of his own company, at which I am not surprised, our yachtsman strolled in the direction of the dream ship to offer unsolicited criticism.

The Reciprocal Morning Douche, Mid-ocean; Steve at the Sextant and Peter at the Helm

"Fine craft you have there," was his introductory remark, and my heart warmed to him. Here, at all events, was a judge. "But too much beam for her length, and too much flaire. She'll break your heart going to wind'ard," he added, judicially, and I confess to loathing him on the instant. Imagine a stranger approaching you in the street and saying: "Fine wife you have there, but I don't like her face—or her action." Well, that is how I felt. For you must be told, unless you are an "owner" and know already, that the simile of the ship and the wife is not so far-fetched as may appear. Yet, with superhuman restraint, I continued to chip iron while it was pointed out to me that lead was better, that to paint spars instead of varnishing them was a crime, and to paint decks was worse; in short, that most things about the dream ship met with this yachtsman's hearty disapproval. To which I was constrained to make answer that with all her defects the dream ship happened to satisfy me because I was an ex-fisherman and not a yachtsman; that for one thing I could not afford to be a yachtsman, and for another I had no wish to be a yachtsman, being rather too fond of the sea. So we parted the best of enemies, and had not done with each other, as will transpire later.

Peter's Cooking Week; Peter Entertains

The moral of this somewhat hectic interlude is: when fitting out for a cruise, get the advice of a deep-water man, and find a place where there are no yachtsmen. This last is difficult, but it is worth while.

Much the same thing applies to the study of navigation. If the beginner lends an ear to the horde of amateur cranks who dabble in the subject, and who seem obsessed with a desire to impart their half-baked theories to others, he will know as much about the practical business of finding a ship's position at sea as he does about the origin of life. There is the long lean man, usually with a drooping moustache, who demonstrates on an instrument of his own invention that can do anything but talk—this last deficiency being amply atoned for by the inventor himself. There is the man with "short cuts" and "clean cuts." There is even the man who still persists in the belief that the world is "flat with rounded edges," and produces reams of his own screed, printed at enormous expense, in support of his theories; but he is easily disposed of. After admitting that the shape of the world is not a burning question with you anyway, because after all it is not a bad old world and certainly the best we can expect in this life, you confess to a sneaking suspicion that it is a rhomboid.

No, there is only one way of learning to find a ship's position at sea if you are unable to spend three months or more at a school of navigation, and that is to find a retired master mariner who, for a stipulated sum, will teach you exactly what he did himself probably three hundred and sixty-five times in the year for thirty years. Hearken unto him, in spite of all lures to the contrary, and in three weeks or less the miracle will cease to be a miracle.

We of the dream ship were fortunate in running such a mentor to earth in his charming cottage on the hillside, overlooking the harbour. The Skipper, as he shall henceforth be called, was of the old school, and so, if it is permissible to say such things of a lady, was his wife! This remarkable woman followed the sea with her husband on every ocean-going schooner he commanded, and once, when the entire crew was down with beri-beri, and a voracious tug hovered alongside like a bird of prey, she brought the ship to port single-handed, thus saving the owners a stupendous sum for salvage. They rewarded her with a presentation piano, and she wept. She could not play. So a cheque for a hundred guineas was substituted, and her husband alleges that she bought three new hats and a galley range in which she cooks the acme in figgy dough to this day.

Using a sextant

The Skipper, a man of monumental and very necessary patience, received us each day in a torture chamber of his own, replete with thumb screw and rack in the form of nautical epitomes, and model craft at variance on the placid surface of a deal table. That small room was the scene of strange and tragic happenings. Gales, fogs, collisions, lee shores, and shipwreck followed one another in rapid succession, and invariably terminated in the short, sharp query: "What do you do now?"

But these things constituted seamanship, which is essentially a matter of experience, not of rote. It was after our first, second, and even third day of attempting to find longitude that we reeled from the classroom, our heads a whirling chaos of logarithms, traverse tables, and despair. At no time that I can recall did our dream come so near to dissolution.

"Have you," muttered Steve, as we paused during our descent to the town, and the strongest cup of tea procurable, "have you the foggiest idea of what we are driving at?"

I admitted that I had not, and the funereal procession proceeded on its way.

There are two methods of attacking the problem of navigation: one is by intelligent understanding, and the other by rule of thumb. If yours is the type of mind that revels in mathematics, then the first is obviously your course, and a pleasant one at that. If, upon the other hand, you are cursed, as I am, with a mind that reels at the mere sight of a timetable, then the second has its points, for you get there just the same, and in spite of experts' warnings to the contrary. Without knowing the why or wherefore of your figurative acrobatics, provided you follow the rule of thumb implicitly, and can add, subtract, multiply, and divide correctly, there is nothing to prevent you from finding a ship's position at sea day in and day out, identically with the greatest experts on earth. I have done it, and I have a shrewd suspicion, backed by the opinion of the Skipper, that more than one master mariner does it in precisely the same way. All hail to logarithms, and the obscure but miraculous gentleman who invented them!

At long last there came a day when the shipwright's hammer ceased to resound aboard the dream ship, and save for provisions and water, and a snowdrift of unpaid bills, we were ready to take leave of the yards.

With an ebb tide and the faithful Skipper aboard, we dropped down the river, and as cleanly as may be on to a mud bank! I am not going to say how it happened, because I do not know. All we were acutely conscious of at the time was that our yachtsman, in his pretty little six-tonner, had chosen the same date of departure as ourselves, and was rapidly approaching down the channel that we should have followed, and had not, and that somehow the secret of our dream must have reached his protruding ears, for as he came abreast of us he reared his hideous form out of the cockpit.

"Hullo," he cried. "Have you made your South Sea Islands already?"

We did not answer, there was nothing to be said; but when a tug hauled us free on the next tide, and rounding a bend in the river, we came upon our adversary in precisely the same predicament, we passed him in silence, the most satisfying silence I have ever indulged in.

Without a dissentient voice, the task of choosing and stowing the provisions was relegated to Peter—— "A woman is so much better at that sort of thing." Steve and I admitted as much, with touching magnanimity.

In due course a cart backed up to the quayside, and an active little grocer proceeded to heap the dream ship's deck with comestibles—tinned, boxed, and jarred. These we passed through the skylights, before an admiring audience of fisher-folk, and Peter, being ambidextrous, contrived to stow them in the lockers with one hand and make a list of them with the other.

I have my own notions about provisioning a dream ship in the future—if for me there is a future in dream ships. During the following year we proved, to our own dissatisfaction, that although tinned food is mighty handy, it is not a healthy continuous diet... No, I see myself laying in salt junk of the windjammer variety, plenty of waterglassed eggs and condensed milk, good ship's biscuits, a "crock" of hand-salted butter, dried fruits, jam or marmalade to taste, pickled beetroot for the blood, flour, raisins, and baking powder, Scotch oatmeal, sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and lard, and nothing else whatsoever. It may be asked: "What else could there possibly be?"—to which I make answer: "A hundred and one canned atrocities, such as Somebody's curried giblets, or Somebody Else's evaporated tripe, that it were better if one consigned to the deep than ate." It is extraordinary the number of useless things one can be lured into acquiring while "fitting out," and we of the dream ship bought most of them.

"Barter" was Peter's idea. In her mind the word was inalienably associated with the South Sea Islands, and were we not bound thither? It was only another example of her boundless optimism. Steve and I might furtively discuss the number of miles between ourselves and our goal, the probable discomfitures by the way, even the possibility of not getting there at all. Not so Peter. We were going to the South Sea Islands, and to go to the South Sea Islands without "barter" was a thing undreamed of in her philosophy. Hence a hurried pilgrimage to London, and the purchase, out of our rapidly diminishing capital, of variegated prints, looking-glasses, imitation tortoise-shell hair combs, Jew's harps, and brown paper belts.

On our return, the Skipper, who had remained aboard as watchman during our absence, displayed a certain uneasiness, the cause of which was hard to determine. He expressed his keen admiration for the dream ship, as he had often done before, and then paused, until goaded into the confession that he wished he thought as much of her crew. That is not how he put it, but that was what he meant, and we were inclined to agree with him. In other words, it was on the dear old man's conscience that he was letting us go to sea with insufficient knowledge, a scruple as rare as it is refreshing these days. We immediately and unanimously pointed out that there was only one way out of the dilemma, and that was for him to accompany us. He shook his grizzled head, and smiled wistfully; said it was twenty years since he had been to sea, that he was too old, that his "missus" would never let him go, and finally, with a twinkle in his keen blue eye, that he would come as far as Spain "just to get us into the hang of longitude," whereat we fell upon him in a pæan of gratitude.

Behold, then, the crew of the dream ship ready to sail, with a combined capital of one hundred pounds sterling, and a clearance for Brisbane, Australia.

AT VIGO, OFF THE COAST OF SPAIN

Some confessions and a few morals

Chapter III headpiece

CHAPTER III

Some confessions and a few morals

At six o'clock the next morning a small, depressed-looking procession wended its way to the quay, followed by the sidelong glances and whispered comments of the fish-market fraternity.

It was the noble army of dream merchants setting forth on its quest. And why depressed? I do not know, except that, personally, on the eve of any problematical undertaking I feel that way, and so, apparently, do others. Perhaps it was that the enthusiasm of ignorance had momentarily deserted us, and we were awed by a rational glimpse of the task that lay ahead. Such moods vanish the instant one gets down to work, the great panacea, but until then they crouch on the shoulders, a dour company.

In silence we rowed out to the dream ship, and hoisted sail. I was going to say that in silence we lowered the dinghy on to its chocks, but, as a fact, the keel descended on the Skipper's toe, extracting a shout of anguish from that usually restrained mariner.

Almost simultaneously, and for no apparent reason, Steve took an involuntary seat on the open skylight, which shut with a crash on one of his fingers.

The moorings were cast off prematurely, and, getting under way on the wrong tack, we sailed, with the utmost precision, into a neighbouring fishing-smack, nearly breaking our bowsprit.

I could imagine the grinning heads of the fisher folk lining the breakwater wall.

"They be goin' ter the South Sea Islands, they be!" I could almost hear them saying, and dived below to show them what a motor auxiliary could do. There were one hundred and fifty vessels moored in that harbour, and I should not like to say how many we fouled during the next half hour. Indeed I could not, for throughout the process I was wrestling with the engine, which refused to budge—until we had rounded the breakwater, and there was no further use for it. Such is the way of these necessary evils aboard a sailing ship.

Coming on deck, I was confronted with a sorry spectacle. Our port light-board was in splinters. Relics of vessels we had caressed in parting littered the deck. The Skipper was in the steering well, with the tiller in one hand and his toe in the other; and Peter was administering iodine and lint to Steve's crushed finger.

"She goes!" I triumphed, tactlessly referring to my Herculean labours with the engine.

"D'you think it's broken?" demanded the Skipper, extending an enormous, bootless foot.

"Flat as a pancake," muttered Steve.

Which gives a fair idea of the trend of individual thought on occasions.

But at long last we were off! Off before a seven-knot nor'-wester, and with only twelve thousand miles to go! What else mattered?

Sailboat, flying fish

By the time we had picked up an intermittent pallor on the horizon that was Ushant light at a distance of thirty miles, the wind had strengthened to half a gale, and there was nothing the dream ship loved more dearly than half a gale on the quarter. In a series of exhilarating swoops, it flung her down into the Bay of Biscay; but what she did not like was being left there to roll helplessly in a windless swell. I have to call it a "swell," just as I have to say we "rolled," though neither word conveys our subsequent acrobatics in the least.

"The Bay" has an unsavoury reputation anyway, but for sheer unpleasantness commend me to the mood in which the dream ship made its acquaintance.

Literally from beam end to beam end we lurched. The engine was useless. Our propeller was out of the quarter, and under present circumstances as much out of the water as in it.

Any one aboard capable of sea-sickness, promptly was. The Skipper who, it must be confessed, had not been able to eat since setting sail, though he clung to his duties like a Stoic, was as near plaintive as I have ever seen him. Curiously enough, his malady took the form of conjuring visions of his good wife's cooking. I honestly believe that if we had been able to produce the roast beef, cabbage, and "figgy dough" of his own home table, he would have eaten. But all we could offer him was bovril, tongue, and tinned asparagus. We did not know how to live, he assured us. On the schooner in the old days he had a stove, not one of these newfangled tin contraptions. And his wife cooked. And when she cooked, she cooked! Figgy dough that melted in the mouth.

At this juncture his audience was well advised to move to a safe distance.

In response to our eternal lurchings, ominous sounds began to filter up from below. A metallic click-clock, click-clock, a methodical thudding, a resounding crash. The first of these proved to be a kerosene tank that had come adrift from its rack fastenings, and threatened to fall on the engine. A galvanized iron receptacle containing seventy gallons of liquid is not the easiest of things to handle in a seaway, let alone with a crushed finger. My heart went out to Steve, but it was characteristic of the man that never a whimper escaped him. All that we could do was to wedge the tank into place with stout battens clean across the ship, which we did, and turned our attention to the next calamity. The piano had followed the example of the tank, and the wash-hand stand had emulated the piano; and rather than appear peculiar, a two-hundred-pound drum of treasured Scotch oatmeal was rolling on the floor, mingling its contents with the brine that oozed from a crate of salt pork wedged under the cabin table.

The crash was merely the dethronement of a lighted stove in the fo'c's'le, on which Peter had been persisting for the last hour, and in spite of her own condition, in an attempt to produce something that the Skipper would eat.

On the whole, a healthy lesson in making all secure before sailing.

In the midst of our agonies below, a stentorian voice hailed us from the cockpit:

"All hands on deck! Lower mainsail!" Which was followed almost immediately by a "crack" like a pistol shot.

Our boom had snapped clean off about five feet from the end.

Such is "the Bay" in lightsome mood. Apparently the only article aboard unaffected by it was the chronometer, ticking placidly in its gimbals and bed of plush. There was something enviable about that chronometer.

The dawn brought with it a faint but steady breath, and discovering that there was sufficient boom left to set a double-reefed mainsail, we continued on our way, and a blessedly even keel, until toward evening we raised the coast of Spain.

The welcome and unmistakable smell of land came to us over the water, and presently the mouth of the Vigo River opened out, revealing a maze of leading lights.

The engine behaved itself, and by midnight the dream ship had anchored off the town, to an accompaniment of star shells and crackers.

It pleased us to imagine that these were our welcome, but as a fact the inevitable Spanish fiesta was in progress. We had made our first foreign port.

THE CANARY ISLANDS

Dropping the pilot—and the result

Chapter IV headpiece

CHAPTER IV

Dropping the pilot—and the result

Our first and imperative need was sleep. There comes a time when enforced wakefulness causes the eyes to feel as though they were sinking into the head. We of the dream ship had reached this pitch, and turned in "all standing," to remain log-like until disturbed by port officials at five o'clock the next morning.

In a state of pyjamas and semi-torpor I handed them the ship's papers, which proved to be satisfactory; Steve treated them to a few chosen words in near-Spanish picked up during a doubtful past in Mexico, and we tumbled in again. But not to sleep. Thereafter, an endless procession of boats, manned by picturesque and voluble brigands who offered for sale every conceivable commodity from anchor chain to picture postcards, succeeded in dragging us from our bunks, and propelling us on deck.

A pleasant little town is Vigo. One of a goodly number scattered over the world that I should like to make my home. Each to his taste, and perhaps I am impressionable as to the desirable spots of this earth, but to my way of thinking almost any race knows how to enjoy life better than the Anglo-Saxon of to-day, and fashions its surroundings to that end.

From the river front, with its handsome promenade, hotels, and green, open spaces, Vigo climbs the sunny hillside in cheerful fashion. No one seems overburdened with business cares, but when such things have to be attended to, the palm-fringed Alamada takes the place of an office, and the "deal" is discussed over vino tinto and cigarettes, to the accompaniment of an excellent band.

We of the dream ship went ashore with the Skipper wearing a fancy-worked carpet-slipper on one foot and a boot on the other, but no one appeared to notice the peculiarity, and it is quite certain the Skipper would not have minded if they had. His is a type of hardihood that I envy as much as I admire.

At lunch, too, he found cause for complaint in the food, and small wonder. After a week's enforced abstention, he found that in these benighted parts figgy dough was as unprocurable as elsewhere. Frankly, he was disappointed in Vigo and, after limping over the cobblestones in clothes more adapted to the Arctic than to Spanish sunshine, he returned aboard "to do a few jobs." We knew what this meant. He would systematically and efficiently set right everything that was wrong aboard the dream ship—a long-splice here, a bit of carpentry there—which was precisely what we ought to have been doing instead of gallivanting about Vigo. Most excellent of skippers! He had been a tower of strength to us in time of stress, and a qualm seized me when I secured his passage to Southampton, and realized that in another week he would be gone.

From the quaint cobbled and terraced streets of the old town we went down to the Alamada, and sat for a while watching the children dance to the music of the band. No organized, mechanical spectacle this, but a joyous affair of rhythmic abandon, twinkling legs, and laughter. Most of us like to think that the children of our own particular country are the most desirable, and they would be poor folk who did not; but for unconscious grace of movement and dainty appearance, the Spanish kiddy is hard to beat.

And this happy absence of self-consciousness is not confined to the children. Picture, if you can, and as we of the dream ship saw him a little later, a well-dressed Spanish gentleman standing in the middle of one of Vigo's main thoroughfares and gazing toward the housetops, apparently engaged in practising the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. No one of the stream of pedestrians passing along the sidewalks took the slightest notice of him. Neither did the wheeled traffic, except to swerve obligingly out of his path. It was his affair, and a love affair at that. He was conversing with his enamorata at the third-floor balcony window in the only way possible to a suitor in Spain, where parents firmly believe in "love at a distance" until the actual engagement. And it needed three vulgar sightseers such as the crew of the dream ship to find anything unusual in the proceeding. I am ashamed to say that the lady caught sight of us, and pointed in alarm, whereat the gentleman turned with an excusable frown of annoyance, and we hurried on our way.

There are only two things the Spaniard takes really seriously: his love and his bull-fights. Leave him to them, as you value a whole skin.

Our next introduction was to the local cable office. Personally, I have always regarded such places as drab receptacles for grudging messages, but with the Eastern Telegraph Company it is a different matter. Certainly this admirable concern takes your message, but then proceeds to take you to its heart, and thereafter, wherever its myriad wires extend, you may be sure of a welcome from the kindliest of hosts. It conducts you to its palatial bachelor quarters situated on the hillside behind the town, and proceeds to spoil you with every device known to a pampered age. Tennis, golf, dances, and dinners are yours to repletion, followed by moonlight car rides into the country, and feasts at distant fondas under the trellised vines.

At any rate, that is what it did with us, and we tried to reciprocate. The Eastern Telegraph Company, or as much of it as could get aboard at one time, made the dream ship its headquarters during our stay; dived from her bowsprit or under her keel with equal delight, mealed off strange messes in her seething saloon, and sang songs on deck to Peter's piano accompaniment below.

With such distractions afoot, it is small wonder that nearly a week slipped by before the subject of a sailing date received the attention it deserved. The Skipper grunted his disapproval of our dilatory methods, and pointed out in a satirical fashion peculiarly his own that there were "things" to be done. Amongst them, he mentioned the necessity of making out a new deviation card by the Polar Star, whereat Steve and I collapsed. Had we not done with this pest of deviation? Had we not already discovered and tabulated, at the cost of terrific mental effort, the error of the dream ship's compass owing to local attraction?

The Skipper admitted as much with a wistful smile, but pointed out that deviation has an aggravating habit of changing with latitude. It was the first we had heard of it, and that night we sat again under our long-suffering professor, and swung the dream ship to a mocking North Star.

Island

Then there was the matter of our broken boom. The Skipper and I towed it over, neatly scarfed (dovetailed and bound) from a neighbouring shipyard the next morning. And the instability of things below as demonstrated in the Bay of Biscay? This was remedied by having iron bands placed round everything movable, and screwed to bulkhead or floor. We were ready. The Skipper stepped ashore with his modest little suitcase, and limped away without so much as a backward glance. Why? His "missus" has told me since that he never expected to see us again.

So we three and the dream ship dropped down Vigo River bound for Las Palmas, Canary Islands, with the biggest mixed cargo of hope and ignorance that ever put to sea.

Four hours on and eight off was how we apportioned our watches and, thanks to fair winds and the easy handling of the dream ship, it was seldom necessary for more than one of us to be on deck at a time. In fact, there were hours on end when the helmsman could peg the tiller and take a constitutional.

Cooking we took week and week about, a dreaded ordeal. It is one thing to concoct food in a porcelain-fitted kitchen on terra firma, and quite another to do it over a primus stove in a leaping, gyrating fo'c's'le. Porridge was found adhering to the ceiling after Steve's "week," but hush! perhaps he may have something to say on the subject of Peter and myself. There is always plenty to say about the other fellow, but in nine cases out of ten it is best left unsaid. Forbearance is as much the keynote of good-fellowship on a dream ship as elsewhere—perhaps more—and we are rather proud of the fact that we have covered half the world without battle, murder, or sudden death.

With only three of a crew some of our troubles may be imagined, but undoubtedly the worst of these, after a couple of weeks at sea, was being awakened from a trance-like sleep to take a trick at the tiller. One does not feel human under such circumstances, but more in the nature of a bear disturbed during hibernation.

And the awakener's task is not much better. He is forced to peg the tiller, even with a following wind, nip below to resuscitate somehow his log-like relief, and get back before the ship jibes. If there is time he may employ the proper and humane method of applying gradually increased pressure to the sleeper's arm until he awakes. If there is not, he must resort to any merciless method that proves effective. In either case, he is as unpopular as an alarm clock, which, by the way, we tried, but discarded on account of its waking everyone aboard.

The manner of our several wakings formed an interesting, if somewhat intimate, subject of discussion at breakfast one morning. Peter's was voted uninteresting because whatever means were employed to arouse her she merely opened her eyes, and meekly murmured: "All right." Steve, upon the other hand, was uncertain. If he happened to be dreaming at the time, which was usually the case, he either hit out the instant he was touched, or muttered something unintelligible, and tenderly covered the disturbing hand with his own.

As for me, I yawned cavernously, invariably said: "How's she going?" and almost as invariably fell asleep again. Or so runs the report, and one is not permitted to argue with reports. Verily, if man would discover himself—and others—let him have recourse to a dream ship and a crew of three!

It was during the passage from Vigo to Las Palmas that we first experienced that most aggravating of winds, the light, varying, following. I have heard schooner skippers declare that they prefer the "head" variety, and I can well believe it. At night, when it is exceedingly difficult to tell where such a wind is coming from, it is no more pleasant to jibe inadvertently than to have to do so sometimes thrice within the hour to keep the ship on her course. It wears out a short-handed, light-weight crew (Peter turned the scale at ninety-eight pounds, Steve at one hundred and forty-five, and myself at one hundred and forty), and conservation of energy, which makes for good health, is of prime importance on a voyage such as ours.

Finally, we lowered the mainsail, with its jolting, crashing boom, and carried on in blessed tranquillity under a squaresail, which proved to be the most useful sail we had aboard.

At the end of seven days' routine, and fair but light winds, we experienced the acute joy of finding land precisely where our frenzied calculations had placed it. As Madeira loomed on the starboard bow, Steve was seen to pace the deck with a quiet but new-born dignity—until hailed below to help wash dishes. But even this failed to quell the navigator's exuberance, and the dish-washer exchanged views on the subject with the helmsman through the skylight. This, then, was the navigation that master mariners made such a song and dance about! Well, we must be master mariners, that was all we had to say! We had summoned Madeira, and Madeira had appeared! We were not at all sure that we had not discovered Madeira!

Peter seemed strangely unimpressed. Perhaps she sensed what is indeed a fact, that luck in navigation, as in most things, favours the beginner. For instance, a mistake somewhere in our calculations brought us as near disaster in the next twenty-four hours as one cares to be. Taking Madeira as our point of departure, we shaped a course for Las Palmas, giving the intervening Salvage Islands a berth of ten miles to the westward. We reckoned this a safe distance, considering that according to "sailing directions" there was still more to the westward a strong current inclining toward the African coast. Well, that current failed to register in the particular case of the dream ship, and on top of it the "mistake somewhere" caused a cold shiver to traverse the spine of the helmsman when, at one o'clock of a pitch-black night, while doing a comfortable seven knots, a mass of rock reared itself out of the sea seemingly not more than a few hundred yards, though probably more nearly a mile, to starboard.

It was the westernmost island of the Salvages, uninhabited, unlighted, and this same helmsman who, as it happens, was myself, would like to know what prevented the "mistake somewhere" from being just that trifle bigger necessary to land us in splinters on the rocks, the fate of more than one good ship provided with a lookout and master mariner. Surely the luck of the beginner!

The incident gave us violently to think, and we thought again when, a few days later, on summoning the island of Grand Canary with the magic wand of sextant and logarithm, it failed to materialize. Had we overrun the entire Canary Group, and were we gaily heading for the African coast with its picturesque Riff pirates who specialize in becalmed ships, or were we even now heading for the iron-bound coast of Grand Canary? In the dense mist that so often shrouds this group we could not tell. Moreover, our dead reckoning said one thing and our observations another. They usually do.

"When in doubt, heave to," was a maxim of the Skipper's that we happened to remember, so we hove to and waited, though for what I am not quite clear. If it were for the mist to disperse, I am inclined to think we should be there still. Steve and I passed the time in heated discussions as to our whereabouts, which under the circumstances was as futile an occupation as any we could have indulged in, but what would you? After golf it is doubtful if there is anything more debatable than incipient navigation. We continued to talk, and the dream ship continued to rock idly on a heavy swell, until Peter broke the spell by emitting a well-known squeak of excitement and pointing heavenward.

"That isn't a cloud," she announced with apparent irrelevance.

It was not. It was the peak of Teneriffe towering out of the mist, to port, like the great pyramid from the sands of Egypt.

"There you are," quoth Steve.

"Exactly," said I, though what either of us meant I have no notion.

"In the meantime," suggested Peter the practical, "don't you think we might be getting on with it?"

On this point the master and the mate of the dream ship were agreed, and the voyage continued.

THE START ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

Visitations—pleasant, and the reverse