ly opposed to any such
idea. He would not give his reasons, but he positively forbade me to do
as I had suggested, instructing me instead to work out a Great Circle
track to Canton, and to get the ship upon her proper course at once.
And as he seemed to be in full possession of all his faculties, and to
know quite well what he was talking about, I had no alternative but to
obey. And indeed, so far as saving the three men in the forecastle was
concerned, we might as well have been heading for Canton as anywhere
else; for Halpin and Glenn died within a couple of hours of each other
that same night, while Sullivan lingered only some twenty-six hours
longer.

I looked forward to a speedy and pleasant run to Canton, for I reckoned
upon carrying the Trades with us practically all the way. But we were
unfortunate; for after a fine run of nine days to the northward and
westward we ran into the belt of equatorial calms in latitude 4 degrees
South, and for fully three weeks thereafter encountered such
extraordinary weather that we dared not ship our fins, from fear of
having them carried away, or of badly straining the schooner. For
instead of the long spell of calms which one usually expects in those
latitudes the quiet weather generally lasted but an hour or two, and
then was succeeded by such furious squalls that, for the most part, we
could do nothing but run before them under bare poles; and perhaps the
most exasperating part of it all was that these squalls blew mostly from
the westward, or nearly dead in our teeth, so that it was only toward
the tail end of them, just when they were dying out, that we were able
to bring the little hooker to the wind for half an hour or so, and make
a few miles of northing. And when it was not blowing with hurricane
strength it was usually just the opposite: a flat calm, with a black,
lowering, overcast sky, moist, steamy, overpowering heat, heavy storms
of thunder and lightning, torrential downpours of tepid rain--which, by
the way, enabled us to re-fill all our water tanks and casks--and
waterspouts _ad libitum_ constantly threatening us with destruction.

It was a month, to a day, from the date of our departure from Roua Poua
when we at length cleared the calm belt and got the first breath of the
north-east Trades in latitude 3 degrees 47 minutes North, and longitude
158 degrees 55 minutes West, having been driven back almost as far east
as Christmas Island by the baffling winds an