"But," our friends objected, "how dare you go to sea without a navigator on board? You're not a navigator, are you?"I had to confess that I was not a navigator, that I had never looked through a sextant in my life, and that I doubted if I could tell a sextant from a nautical almanac.And when they asked if Roscoe was a navigator, I shook my head.Roscoe resented this.He had glanced at the "Epitome," bought for our voyage, knew how to use logarithm tables, had seen a sextant at some time, and, what of this and of his seafaring ancestry, he concluded that he did know navigation.
But Roscoe was wrong, I still insist.When a young boy he came from Maine to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and that was the only time in his life that he was out of sight of land.He had never gone to a school of navigation, nor passed an examination in the same; nor had he sailed the deep sea and learned the art from some other navigator.He was a San Francisco Bay yachtsman, where land is always only several miles away and the art of navigation is never employed.
So the Snark started on her long voyage without a navigator.We beat through the Golden Gate on April 23, and headed for the Hawaiian Islands, twenty-one hundred sea-miles away as the gull flies.And the outcome was our justification.We arrived.And we arrived, furthermore, without any trouble, as you shall see; that is, without any trouble to amount to anything.To begin with, Roscoe tackled the navigating.He had the theory all right, but it was the first time he had ever applied it, as was evidenced by the erratic behaviour of the Snark.Not but what the Snark was perfectly steady on the sea; the pranks she cut were on the chart.
On a day with a light breeze she would make a jump on the chart that advertised "a wet sail and a flowing sheet," and on a day when she just raced over the ocean, she scarcely changed her position on the chart.Now when one's boat has logged six knots for twenty-four consecutive hours, it is incontestable that she has covered one hundred and forty-four miles of ocean.The ocean was all right, and so was the patent log; as for speed, one saw it with his own eyes.
Therefore the thing that was not all right was the figuring that refused to boost the Snark along over the chart.Not that this happened every day, but that it did happen.And it was perfectly proper and no more than was to be expected from a first attempt at applying a theory.
The acquisition of the knowledge of navigation has a strange effect on the minds of men.The average navigator speaks of navigation with deep respect.To the layman navigation is a deed and awful mystery, which feeling has been generated in him by the deep and awful respect for navigation that the layman has seen displayed by navigators.I have known frank, ingenuous, and modest young men, open as the day, to learn navigation and at once betray secretiveness, reserve, and self-importance as if they had achieved some tremendous intellectual attainment.The average navigator impresses the layman as a priest of some holy rite.With bated breath, the amateur yachtsman navigator invites one in to look at his chronometer.And so it was that our friends suffered such apprehension at our sailing without a navigator.
During the building of the Snark, Roscoe and I had an agreement, something like this: "I'll furnish the books and instruments," Isaid, "and do you study up navigation now.I'll be too busy to do any studying.Then, when we get to sea, you can teach me what you have learned." Roscoe was delighted.Furthermore, Roscoe was as frank and ingenuous and modest as the young men I have described.
But when we got out to sea and he began to practise the holy rite, while I looked on admiringly, a change, subtle and distinctive, marked his bearing.When he shot the sun at noon, the glow of achievement wrapped him in lambent flame.When he went below, figured out his observation, and then returned on deck and announced our latitude and longitude, there was an authoritative ring in his voice that was new to all of us.But that was not the worst of it.
He became filled with incommunicable information.And the more he discovered the reasons for the erratic jumps of the Snark over the chart, and the less the Snark jumped, the more incommunicable and holy and awful became his information.My mild suggestions that it was about time that I began to learn, met with no hearty response, with no offers on his part to help me.He displayed not the slightest intention of living up to our agreement.
