hat alarming at the first blush. We must push off without chart
or quadrant; though, as will shortly be seen, a compass was by no
means out of the question. The chart, to be sure, I did not so much
lay to heart; but a quadrant was more than desirable. Still, it was
by no means indispensable. For this reason. When we started, our
latitude would be exactly known; and whether, on our voyage westward,
we drifted north or south therefrom, we could not, by any
possibility, get so far out of our reckoning, as to fail in striking
some one of a long chain of islands, which, for many degrees, on both
sides of the equator, stretched right across our track.

For much the same reason, it mattered little, whether on our passage
we daily knew our longitude; for no known land lay between us and the
place we desired to reach. So what could be plainer than this: that
if westward we patiently held on our way, we must eventually achieve
our destination?

As for intervening shoals or reefs, if any there were, they
intimidated us not. In a boat that drew but a few inches of water,
but an indifferent look-out would preclude all danger on that score.
At all events, the thing seemed feasible enough, notwithstanding old
Jarl's superstitious reverence for nautical instruments, and the
philosophical objections which might have been urged by a pedantic
disciple of Mercator.

Very often, as the old maxim goes, the simplest things are the most
startling, and that, too, from their very simplicity. So cherish no
alarms, if thus we addressed the setting sun--"Be thou, old pilot,
our guide!"

CHAPTER V
Seats Secured And Portmanteaus Packed

But thoughts of sextants and quadrants were the least of our cares.

Right from under the very arches of the eyebrows of thirty men--
captain, mates, and crew--a boat was to be abstracted; they knowing
nothing of the event, until all knowledge would prove unavailing.

Hark ye:

At sea, the boats of a South Sea-man (generally four in number, spare
ones omitted,) are suspended by tackles, hooked above, to curved
timbers called "davits," vertically fixed to the ship's sides.

Now, no fair one with golden locks is more assiduously waited upon,
or more delicately handled by her tire-women, than the slender whale-
boat by her crew. And out of its element, it seems fragile enough to
justify the utmost solicitude. For truly, like a fine lady, the fine
whale-boat is most delicate when idle, though little coy