st-southeast. This is more or
less the constant state of the winter trades in latitude 12 degrees
S., where I "ran down the longitude" for weeks. The sun, we all know,
is the creator of the trade-winds and of the wind system over all the
earth. But ocean meteorology is, I think, the most fascinating of all.
From Juan Fernandez to the Marquesas I experienced six changes of
these great palpitations of sea-winds and of the sea itself, the
effect of far-off gales. To know the laws that govern the winds, and
to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage
round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every
cloud. What is true of this in the trade-winds is much more so in the
variables, where changes run more to extremes.

To cross the Pacific Ocean, even under the most favorable
circumstances, brings you for many days close to nature, and you
realize the vastness of the sea. Slowly but surely the mark of my
little ship's course on the track-chart reached out on the ocean and
across it, while at her utmost speed she marked with her keel still
slowly the sea that carried her. On the forty-third day from land,--a
long time to be at sea alone,--the sky being beautifully clear and the
moon being "in distance" with the sun, I threw up my sextant for
sights. I found from the result of three observations, after long
wrestling with lunar tables, that her longitude by observation agreed
within five miles of that by dead-reckoning.

This was wonderful; both, however, might be in error, but somehow I
felt confident that both were nearly true, and that in a few hours
more I should see land; and so it happened, for then I made the island
of Nukahiva, the southernmost of the Marquesas group, clear-cut and
lofty. The verified longitude when abreast was somewhere between the
two reckonings; this was extraordinary. All navigators will tell you
that from one day to another a ship may lose or gain more than five
miles in her sailing-account, and again, in the matter of lunars, even
expert lunarians are considered as doing clever work when they average
within eight miles of the truth.

I hope I am making it clear that I do not lay claim to cleverness or
to slavish calculations in my reckonings. I think I have already
stated that I kept my longitude, at least, mostly by intuition. A
rotator log always towed astern, but so much has to be allowed for
currents and for drift, which the log never shows, that