n Miles, taking advantage
of the opportunity, took his angles, a sight of two of the
constellations also helping his calculations, and giving him data to
work upon. He then went down to his cabin again to work out the
reckoning.

"Guess where we are, Marline?" he said when he came up for the second
time. "I don't think you'll be able to tell within a degree!"

"Somewhere between the forties, I should think, with all this scudding
about north and south," replied the other.

"Well, I make it that we're just about 33 degrees 10 minutes North, and
41 degrees West longitude. What do you think of that, eh?"

"Never!" exclaimed the first mate.

"But, it's true enough," returned Captain Miles. "I assure you I've
tested my reckoning in every way, those star altitudes enabling me to
correct my lunars. Yes, Marline, you see we did not lose so much by
carrying on to the north as you fancied we would; and this blustering
north-wester has now taken us almost eight hundred miles in the very
direction we wanted to go. If we had lain to, as you wanted at first,
we should now have been considerably to the southward of our position,
and would probably have had to beat up northwards again; whereas now, as
soon as the gale is blown out, we'll be right in the trades for home."

"And won't we touch the Gulf Stream, then?" I asked.

"No, my boy, thank goodness, we're a long way from that; but if you're
anxious to see the Gulf-weed I told you about, we're now in its native
home, a region called the Sargasso Sea."

"The Sargasso Sea!" I repeated. "I never heard of that before."

"No, I don't suppose you have," replied Captain Miles in answer to my
implied question. "It is a name applied to a calm expanse of the ocean
between the Gulf Stream and the Equatorial Current, and is called so
from the _Sargassum_, or Gulf-weed, which is continually found floating
there--that is, when the wind is not too strong, as now, to blow it
elsewhere. You'll see plenty of the stuff as soon as the gale lulls,
which it must do now, I think, in a very few hours."

"Are you going to carry on still before it, sir?" asked Mr Marline.

"Of course," answered the captain. "The ship is sailing easily and not
straining herself, as she would do if lying-to; and we can't run into
any harm following the same course till morning. I intend to work the
gale in the same way as a friend of mine once treated a runaway horse.
It first started off to please its