And he cannot escape returning from such a voyage a bigger and better man.And as for sport, it is a king's sport, taking one's self around the world, doing it with one's own hands, depending on no one but one's self, and at the end, back at the starting-point, contemplating with inner vision the planet rushing through space, and saying, "I did it; with my own hands I did it.I went clear around that whirling sphere, and I can travel alone, without any nurse of a sea-captain to guide my steps across the seas.I may not fly to other stars, but of this star I myself am master."As I write these lines I lift my eyes and look seaward.I am on the beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu.Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea.Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green.Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red.Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks.Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf.As I say, I lift my eyes to all this, and through the white crest of a breaker suddenly appears a dark figure, erect, a man-fish or a sea-god, on the very forward face of the crest where the top falls over and down, driving in toward shore, buried to his loins in smoking spray, caught up by the sea and flung landward, bodily, a quarter of a mile.It is a Kanaka on a surf-board.And I know that when I have finished these lines Ishall be out in that riot of colour and pounding surf, trying to bit those breakers even as he, and failing as he never failed, but living life as the best of us may live it.And the picture of that coloured sea and that flying sea-god Kanaka becomes another reason for the young man to go west, and farther west, beyond the Baths of Sunset, and still west till he arrives home again.
But to return.Please do not think that I already know it all.Iknow only the rudiments of navigation.There is a vast deal yet for me to learn.On the Snark there is a score of fascinating books on navigation waiting for me.There is the danger-angle of Lecky, there is the line of Sumner, which, when you know least of all where you are, shows most conclusively where you are, and where you are not.There are dozens and dozens of methods of finding one's location on the deep, and one can work years before he masters it all in all its fineness.
Even in the little we did learn there were slips that accounted for the apparently antic behaviour of the Snark.On Thursday, May 16, for instance, the trade wind failed us.During the twenty-four hours that ended Friday at noon, by dead reckoning we had not sailed twenty miles.Yet here are our positions, at noon, for the two days, worked out from our observations:
Thursday 20 degrees 57 minutes 9 seconds N152 degrees 40 minutes 30 seconds W
Friday21 degrees 15 minutes 33 seconds N154 degrees 12 minutesW
The difference between the two positions was something like eighty miles.Yet we knew we had not travelled twenty miles.Now our figuring was all right.We went over it several times.What was wrong was the observations we had taken.To take a correct observation requires practice and skill, and especially so on a small craft like the Snark.The violently moving boat and the closeness of the observer's eye to the surface of the water are to blame.A big wave that lifts up a mile off is liable to steal the horizon away.
But in our particular case there was another perturbing factor.The sun, in its annual march north through the heavens, was increasing its declination.On the 19th parallel of north latitude in the middle of May the sun is nearly overhead.The angle of arc was between eighty-eight and eighty-nine degrees.Had it been ninety degrees it would have been straight overhead.It was on another day that we learned a few things about taking the altitude of the almost perpendicular sun.Roscoe started in drawing the sun down to the eastern horizon, and he stayed by that point of the compass despite the fact that the sun would pass the meridian to the south.I, on the other hand, started in to draw the sun down to south-east and strayed away to the south-west.You see, we were teaching ourselves.As a result, at twenty-five minutes past twelve by the ship's time, I called twelve o'clock by the sun.Now this signified that we had changed our location on the face of the world by twenty-five minutes, which was equal to something like six degrees of longitude, or three hundred and fifty miles.This showed the Snark had travelled fifteen knots per hour for twenty-four consecutive hours--and we had never noticed it! It was absurd and grotesque.
But Roscoe, still looking east, averred that it was not yet twelve o'clock.He was bent on giving us a twenty-knot clip.Then we began to train our ***tants rather wildly all around the horizon, and wherever we looked, there was the sun, puzzlingly close to the sky-line, sometimes above it and sometimes below it.In one direction the sun was proclaiming morning, in another direction it was proclaiming afternoon.The sun was all right--we knew that;therefore we were all wrong.And the rest of the afternoon we spent in the cockpit reading up the matter in the books and finding out what was wrong.We missed the observation that day, but we didn't the next.We had learned.
And we learned well, better than for a while we thought we had.At the beginning of the second dog-watch one evening, Charmian and Isat down on the forecastle-head for a rubber of cribbage.Chancing to glance ahead, I saw cloud-capped mountains rising from the sea.
We were rejoiced at the sight of land, but I was in despair over our navigation.I thought we had learned something, yet our position at noon, plus what we had run since, did not put us within a hundred miles of land.But there was the land, fading away before our eyes in the fires of sunset.The land was all right.There was no disputing it.Therefore our navigation was all wrong.But it wasn't.That land we saw was the summit of Haleakala, the House of the Sun, the greatest extinct volcano in the world.It towered ten thousand feet above the sea, and it was all of a hundred miles away.
We sailed all night at a seven-knot clip, and in the morning the House of the Sun was still before us, and it took a few more hours of sailing to bring it abreast of us."That island is Maui," we said, verifying by the chart."That next island sticking out is Molokai, where the lepers are.And the island next to that is Oahu.
There is Makapuu Head now.We'll be in Honolulu to-morrow.Our navigation is all right."