no more the first captain was so as to be unable to give a for a boom jaw to a carpenter so utterly helpless was he that he was unable to order a sailor to throw a few of salt water on the s deck for twelve days at anchor under an overhead sun the deck lay dry it was a new deck it cost me one hundred and thirty five dollars to it the second captain was angry he was the of the born angry papa is always angry was the description given him by his half breed son the third captain was so crooked that he couldn t hide behind a the truth was not in him common honesty was not in him and he was as far away from fair play and square dealing as he was from his proper course when he nearly wrecked the on the it was at in the that i discharged my third and last captain and took up again the of amateur i had it once before under my first captain who out of san jumped the so over the that i really had to find out what was doing it was fairly easy to find out for we had a run of twenty one hundred miles before us i knew nothing of but after several hours of reading up and half an hour s practice with the i was able to find the s latitude by observation and her by the simple method known as equal this is not a correct method it is not even a safe method but my captain was attempting to by it and he was the only one on board who should have been able to tell me that it was a method to be i brought the to but the conditions favored me the sun was in northern and nearly overhead the legitimate sight method of the i had not heard of � yes i had heard of it my first captain mentioned it vaguely but after one or two attempts at practice of it he mentioned it no more i had time in the to compare my with two other two weeks previous the amateur at in i had asked my captain to compare our with the on the american the this he told me he had done � of course he had done nothing of the famous road the sort and he told me that the difference he had ascertained was only a small of a second he told it to me with finely joy and with words of praise for my splendid time keeper i repeat it now with words of praise for his splendid and for behold fourteen days later the of the in i compared the with the one on the an steamer and that mine was thirty one seconds fast now thirty one seconds of time converted into arc equals seven and miles that is to say if i were sailing west in the night time and my position according to my dead reckoning from my afternoon sight was shown to be seven miles off the land why at that very moment i would be crashing on the next i my with captain s captain the gives the time to firing a gun signal at twelve noon three times a week according to his mine was seconds fast which is to say that sailing west i should be crashing on the when i thought i was fifteen miles off from it i by thirty one seconds from the total of my s losing error and sailed away for in the new resolved when around the land on dark nights to bear in mind the other seven miles i might be out according to captain s instrument lay some six hundred miles west from the and it was my belief that while covering that distance i could quite easily knock into my head sufficient to get me there well i got there but listen first to my troubles is easy i shall always contend that but when a man is taking three engines and a wife around the world and is writing hard every day to keep the engines supplied with and the wife with pearls and he hasn t much time left in which to study also it is bound to be easier to study said science ashore where the amateur latitude and are in a house whose position never than it is to study on a boat that is rushing along day and night toward land that one is trying to find and which he is liable to find at a moment when he least expects it to begin with there are the and the setting of the courses we sailed from on saturday afternoon june and it took us till after dark to run the narrow ridden passage between the islands of and the open ocean lay before me there was nothing in the way with the exception of a miserable little island that persisted in up through the sea some twenty miles to the west � just where i wanted to go of course it seemed quite simple to avoid it by a course that would pass it eight or ten miles to the north it was a black night and we were running before the wind the man at the wheel must be told what direction to steer in order to miss but what direction i turned me to the books true course i lighted upon the very thing what i wanted was the true course i read eagerly on the true course is the angle made with the by a straight line on the drawn to connect the ship s position with the place bound to just what i wanted the s position was at the western entrance of the passage between and the immediate place she was bound to was a place 