ly 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon. And within
the hour we were taking in sail and lying down to the snow-gusts of a
fresh south-west gale.

_Whatever you do_, _make westing_! _make westing_!--this sailing rule of
the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron. I can
understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left
sailors, fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a boat.
Cape Horn is iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around from east
to west.

And we make easting! This west wind is eternal. I listen incredulously
when Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when easterly winds have
blown in these latitudes. It is impossible. Always does the west wind
blow, gale upon gale and gales everlasting, else why the "Great West Wind
Drift" printed on the charts! We of the afterguard are weary of this
eternal buffeting. Our men have become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded
shadows of men. I should not be surprised, in the end, to see Captain
West turn tail and run eastward around the world to Seattle. But
Margaret smiles with surety, and nods her head, and affirms that her
father will win around to 50 in the Pacific.

How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room of
iron in the 'midship-house is beyond me--just as it is beyond me that the
wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down in their
bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of the watches.

Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty miles
due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a driving
gale, on the port tack. The glass is down to 28.58, and even Mr. Pike
acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters he has ever
experienced.

In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64 degrees
or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a favouring
spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the extreme-narrowing
wedges of longitude. But of late years all shipmasters have accepted the
hugging of the land all the way around. Out of ten times ten thousand
passages of Cape Stiff from east to west, this, they have concluded, is
the best strategy. So Captain West hugs the land. He heaves-to on the
port tack until the leeward drift brings the land into perilous
proximity, then wears ship and heaves-to on the port tack and makes
leeway off shore.

I may be weary of al