They added one or two more knots to their speed thereby, and after three days, ran the Straits of Tsushima: a procedure that might have been devised by some fiendish engineer specifically to drive van Hoek mad with anxiety, as it involved running down a complex and current-ridden, yet poorly charted chute hemmed in on one side by pirate-islands of Korea and on the other by a country (Japan) where it was death for a foreigner to set foot. The paintings of Gabriel Goto’s father were of very little use because that ronin had been piloting a boat of much shallower draft than Minerva and invariably chose to hug shorelines and squirt through gaps between islands where Minerva could not go.