Chapter XII
So sailed the Ship of Fools--Michael playing with Scraps, respecting
Cocky and by Cocky being bullied and wheedled, singing with Steward and
worshipping him; Daughtry drinking his six quarts of beer each day, collecting his wages the first of each month, and admiring Charles Stough Greenleaf as the finest man on board; Kwaque serving and loving his master and thickening and darkening and creasing his brow with the growing leprous infiltration; Ah Moy avoiding the Black Papuan as the very plague, washing himself continuously and boiling his blankets once a week; Captain Doane doing the navigating and worrying about his flat-building in San Francisco; Grimshaw resting his ham-hands on his colossal knees and girding at the pawnbroker to contribute as much to the adventure as he was contributing from his wheat-ranches; Simon Nishikanta wiping his sweaty neck with the greasy silk handkerchief and painting endless water-colours; the mate patiently stealing the ship's latitude and longitude with his duplicate key; and the Ancient Mariner, solacing himself with Scotch highballs, smoking fragrant three-for-a-dollar Havanas that were charged to the adventure, and for ever maundering about the hell of the longboat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom under the sand.
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other stretches of
ocean and unidentifiable from them. No land broke the sea-rim. The ship
the centre, the horizon was the invariable and eternal circle of the
world. The magnetic needle in the binnacle was the point on which the
Mary Turner ever pivoted. The sun rose in the undoubted east and set
in the undoubted west, corrected and proved, of course, by declination, deviation, and variation; and the nightly march of the stars and constellations proceeded across the sky.
And in this stretch of ocean, lookouts were mastheaded at day-dawn and
kept mastheaded until twilight of evening, when the Mary Turner was
hove-to, to hold her position through the night. As time went by, and
the scent, according to the Ancient Mariner, grow hotter, all three of
the investors in the adventure came to going aloft. Grimshaw contented
himself with standing on the main crosstrees. Captain Doane climbed even
higher, seating himself on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle
of the butt of the fore-topmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away
from his everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky
such as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up the
ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two grinning, slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed him squarely on the crosstrees and left him to stare with eyes of golden desire, across the sun-washed sea through the finest pair of unredeemed binoculars that had ever been pledged in his pawnshops.
"Strange," the Ancient Mariner would mutter, "strange, and most strange. This is the very place. There can be no mistake. I'd have trusted that youngster of a third officer anywhere. He was only eighteen, but he could navigate better than the captain. Didn't he fetch the atoll after eighteen days in the longboat? No standard compasses, and you know what a small-boat horizon is, with a big sea, for a sextant. He died, but the dying course he gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very next day after I hove his body overboard."
Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet the
mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
"It cannot have sunk, surely," the Ancient Mariner would tactfully carry
across the forbidding pause. "The island was no mere shoal or reef. The
Lion's Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five feet. I saw the
captain and the third officer triangulate it."
"I've raked and combed the sea," Captain Doane would then break out, "and
the teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let slip through a four-
thousand-foot peak."
"Strange, strange," the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to his
cogitating soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers. Then, with a sudden
brightening, he would add:
"But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane. Have you
allowed for the change in variation for half a century! That should make
a grave difference. Why, as I understand it, who am no navigator, the
variation was not so definitely and accurately known in those days as
now."