hip that might have seen the light to work her slow way to
them through the nearly dead calm. Then they gave it up and set about
their plans. If you will look at the map you will say that their
course could be easily decided. Albemarle Island (Galapagos group) lies
straight eastward nearly a thousand miles; the islands referred to in
the diary as 'some islands' (Revillagigedo Islands) lie, as they think,
in some widely uncertain region northward about one thousand miles and
westward one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles. Acapulco, on the
Mexican coast, lies about north-east something short of one thousand
miles. You will say random rocks in the ocean are not what is wanted;
let them strike for Acapulco and the solid continent. That does look
like the rational course, but one presently guesses from the diaries
that the thing would have been wholly irrational--indeed, suicidal. If
the boats struck for Albemarle they would be in the doldrums all the
way; and that means a watery perdition, with winds which are wholly
crazy, and blow from all points of the compass at once and also
perpendicularly. If the boats tried for Acapulco they would get out of
the doldrums when half-way there--in case they ever got half-way--and
then they would be in lamentable case, for there they would meet the
north-east trades coming down in their teeth, and these boats were so
rigged that they could not sail within eight points of the wind. So they
wisely started northward, with a slight slant to the west. They had but
ten days' short allowance of food; the long-boat was towing the others;
they could not depend on making any sort of definite progress in the
doldrums, and they had four or five hundred miles of doldrums in front
of them yet. They are the real equator, a tossing, roaring, rainy belt,
ten or twelve hundred miles broad, which girdles the globe.

It rained hard the first night and all got drenched, but they filled up
their water-butt. The brothers were in the stern with the captain, who
steered. The quarters were cramped; no one got much sleep. 'Kept on our
course till squalls headed us off.'

Stormy and squally the next morning, with drenching rains. A heavy and
dangerous 'cobbling' sea. One marvels how such boats could live in it.
Is it called a feat of desperate daring when one man and a dog cross the
Atlantic in a boat the size of a long-boat, and indeed it is; but this
long-boat was overloaded with men and other plunder, and