oys had, as we observed before, a great idea of the
importance of a gunner, and, among other qualifications, he considered
it absolutely necessary that he should be a navigator. He had at least
ten instances to bring forward of bloody actions, in which the captain
and all the commissioned officers had been killed or wounded, and the
command of the ship had devolved upon the gunner.

"Now, sir," would he say, "if the gunner is no navigator, he is not fit
to take charge of his Majesty's ships. The boatswain and carpenter are
merely practical men; but the gunner, sir, is, or ought to be,
scientific. Gunnery, sir, is a science--we have our own disparts and
our lines of sight--our windage and our parabolas and projectile
forces--and our point blank, and our reduction of powder upon a
graduated scale. Now, sir, there's no excuse for a gunner not being a
navigator; for knowing his duty as a gunner, he has the same
mathematical tools to work with." Upon this principle Mr Tallboys had
added John Hamilton Moore to his library, and had advanced about as far
into navigation as he had in gunnery, that is, to the threshold, where
he stuck fast, with all his mathematical tools, which he did not know
how to use. To do him justice, he studied for two or three hours
everyday, and it was not his fault if he did not advance--but his head
was confused with technical terms; he mixed all up together, and
disparts, sines and cosines, parabolas, tangents, windage, seconds,
lines of sight, logarithms, projectiles and traverse sailing, quadrature
and Gunter's scales, were all crowded together, in a brain which had not
capacity to receive the rule of three. "Too much learning," said Festus
to the apostle, "hath made thee mad." Mr Tallboys had not wit enough
to go mad, but his learning lay like lead upon his brain: the more he
read, the less he understood, at the same time that he became more
satisfied with his supposed acquirements, and could not speak but in
"mathematical parables."

"I understand, Mr Easy," said the gunner to him one day, after they had
sailed for Malta, "that you have entered into the science of
navigation--at your age it was high time."

"Yes," replied Jack, "I can raise a perpendicular, at all events, and
box the compass."

"Yes, but you have not yet arrived at the dispart of the compass."

"Not come to that yet," replied Jack.

"Are you aware that a ship sailing describes a parabola round the
globe?"

"Not c