amusement to Captain Solomon and sometimes they weren't. When they
didn't amuse Captain Solomon they didn't usually amuse little Sol,
either.

Every captain of a ship keeps a sort of diary, or journal, of the voyage
that ship is making. This diary is usually called the ship's log. And
every day he writes in it what happened that day; the courses the ship
sailed and the number of miles she sailed on each course; the sails that
were set and the direction and strength of the wind; and the state of
the weather and the exact part of the ocean she was in and the time that
she was there.

The exact part of the ocean that the ship is in is usually found by
looking at the sun, just at noon, through a little three-cornered thing,
called a sextant, that is small enough for the captain or the mate to
hold in his hands; and by seeing what time it is, by a sort of clock,
when the sun is the very highest. Then the captain goes down into the
cabin and does some arithmetic out of a book, using the things that his
sextant had told him, and he finds just exactly where the ship was at
noon of that day. Then he pricks the position of the ship on a chart,
which is a map of the ocean, so that he can see how well she is going on
her course.

Sometimes it is cloudy at noon, so that he can't look at the sun then,
but it clears up after dark. Then the captain looks through his sextant
at the moon, or at some bright star, and finds his position that way.
And sometimes it is cloudy for several days together, so that he can't
take an observation with his sextant in all that time. Captains don't
like it very well when it is cloudy for several days together, for then
they have nothing to tell them just where the ship is, but what is
called "dead reckoning."

[Illustration]

Captain Solomon usually had the speed at which the ship was sailing
measured several times every day. When he wanted that done, he called a
sailor to "heave the log;" and the sailor came and took up a real log,
or board, fastened to the end of a long rope, while one of the mates
held an hour glass. But there wasn't sand enough in the glass to run for
an hour, but it would run for half a minute. And when the mate gave the
word, the sailor dropped the log over the stern of the ship and the mate
turned the glass. And the sailor held the reel with the rope on it, so
that the rope would run off freely, and he counted, aloud, the knots in
the rope as it ran out. For the rope had k