There remained only one thing to do--to work south out of the trade and into the variables.It is true that Captain Bruce found no variables on his traverse, and that he "never could make easting on either tack." It was the variables or nothing with us, and we prayed for better luck than he had had.The variables constitute the belt of ocean lying between the trades and the doldrums, and are conjectured to be the draughts of heated air which rise in the doldrums, flow high in the air counter to the trades, and gradually sink down till they fan the surface of the ocean where they are found.And they are found where they are found; for they are wedged between the trades and the doldrums, which same shift their territory from day to day and month to month.
We found the variables in 11 degrees north latitude, and 11 degrees north latitude we hugged jealously.To the south lay the doldrums.
To the north lay the northeast trade that refused to blow from the northeast.The days came and went, and always they found the Snark somewhere near the eleventh parallel.The variables were truly variable.A light head-wind would die away and leave us rolling in a calm for forty-eight hours.Then a light head-wind would spring up, blow for three hours, and leave us rolling in another calm for forty-eight hours.Then--hurrah!--the wind would come out of the west, fresh, beautifully fresh, and send the Snark along, wing and wing, her wake bubbling, the log-line straight astern.At the end of half an hour, while we were preparing to set the spinnaker, with a few sickly gasps the wind would die away.And so it went.We wagered optimistically on every favourable fan of air that lasted over five minutes; but it never did any good.The fans faded out just the same.
But there were exceptions.In the variables, if you wait long enough, something is bound to happen, and we were so plentifully stocked with food and water that we could afford to wait.On October 26, we actually made one hundred and three miles of easting, and we talked about it for days afterwards.Once we caught a moderate gale from the south, which blew itself out in eight hours, but it helped us to seventy-one miles of easting in that particular twenty-four hours.And then, just as it was expiring, the wind came straight out from the north (the directly opposite quarter), and fanned us along over another degree of easting.
In years and years no sailing vessel has attempted this traverse, and we found ourselves in the midst of one of the loneliest of the Pacific solitudes.In the sixty days we were crossing it we sighted no sail, lifted no steamer's smoke above the horizon.A disabled vessel could drift in this deserted expanse for a dozen generations, and there would be no rescue.The only chance of rescue would be from a vessel like the Snark, and the Snark happened to be there principally because of the fact that the traverse had been begun before the particular paragraph in the sailing directions had been read.Standing upright on deck, a straight line drawn from the eye to the horizon would measure three miles and a half.Thus, seven miles was the diameter of the circle of the sea in which we had our centre.Since we remained always in the centre, and since we constantly were moving in some direction, we looked upon many circles.But all circles looked alike.No tufted islets, gray headlands, nor glistening patches of white canvas ever marred the symmetry of that unbroken curve.Clouds came and went, rising up over the rim of the circle, flowing across the space of it, and spilling away and down across the opposite rim.
The world faded as the procession of the weeks marched by.The world faded until at last there ceased to be any world except the little world of the Snark, freighted with her seven souls and floating on the expanse of the waters.Our memories of the world, the great world, became like dreams of former lives we had lived somewhere before we came to be born on the Snark.After we had been out of fresh vegetables for some time, we mentioned such things in much the same way I have heard my father mention the vanished apples of his boyhood.Man is a creature of habit, and we on the Snark had got the habit of the Snark.Everything about her and aboard her was as a matter of course, and anything different would have been an irritation and an offence.
There was no way by which the great world could intrude.Our bell rang the hours, but no caller ever rang it.There were no guests to dinner, no telegrams, no insistent telephone jangles invading our privacy.We had no engagements to keep, no trains to catch, and there were no morning newspapers over which to waste time in learning what was happening to our fifteen hundred million other fellow-creatures.
But it was not dull.The affairs of our little world had to be regulated, and, unlike the great world, our world had to be steered in its journey through space.Also, there were cosmic disturbances to be encountered and baffled, such as do not afflict the big earth in its frictionless orbit through the windless void.And we never knew, from moment to moment, what was going to happen next.There were spice and variety enough and to spare.Thus, at four in the morning, I relieve Hermann at the wheel.
"East-northeast," he gives me the course."She's eight points off, but she ain't steering."Small wonder.The vessel does not exist that can be steered in so absolute a calm.
"I had a breeze a little while ago--maybe it will come back again,"Hermann says hopefully, ere he starts forward to the cabin and his bunk.