,
the wind went faster than we, giving a cooling breeze as it passed
over; and it was as steady and moderate as it was fair for our next
destination, Aden, to reach which we were now pointing for Cape
Guardafui. The _Iroquois_ ran along steadily northward, six to eight
knots, followed by a big sea, but so regular that she rolled only with
a slow, steady swing, not disagreeable. The veiled sun showed
sufficiently for sights, without burning heat, and by the same token
we passed that luminary on our course; that is, he was north of us
while at Johanna, and one day on this run we got north of him. This
must have been after we had crossed the equator; for, being August,
the sun was still north of the "Line."

This reminds me that, the day we thus passed the sun, our navigator,
usually very exact, applied his declination wrong at noon, which gave
us a wrong latitude. For a few minutes the discrepancy between the
observation and the log caused a shaking of heads; the log doubtless
fell under an unmerited suspicion, or else we had encountered a
current not hitherto noted in the books, the usual solvent in such
perplexities. I may explain for the unlearned in navigation that
declination of a heavenly body corresponds in the celestial sphere to
the latitude of an object on the terrestrial. The sun, being a
leisurely celestial globe-trotter, continually varies his
latitude--declination--within a zone bounded by the two tropics; and
the rule runs that when his declination is of the same name (north or
south) as his direction from the ship at noon, the declination is
added or subtracted, I now forget which, in the computation that
ascertains the vessel's precise position. This has to be remembered
when he is passed overhead, in the zenith; for then the bearing
changes, while his declination remains of the same name. If the
resulting error is large, of course the mistake is detected
immediately; a slight difference might pass unnoted with dangerous
consequences.

At Johanna, or possibly at St. Augustine's, some of our officers and
men, moved by that queer propensity of mankind to acquire strange
objects, however useless, had bought animals of the kind called
mongoos. There were perhaps a half-dozen of these in all. The result
was that most of them, one way or another, escaped and took refuge
aloft in the rigging, where it was as hopeless to attempt recapture
as for a man to pursue a gray squirrel in a tree. The poor beggars had