“Makes you feel cold, don’t it?” asked Mr. Sprigg cheerfully. “Lord bless you, that’s nothing to the way you’ll feel before it’s over. Funny the weather bureau didn’t give us any storm warnings before we sailed.”
The weather bureau had, but the warnings had been thrown away, unposted, by a sapient native official of San Juan, who considered the efforts of the Americans to foretell the weather to be immoral.
“Will there be any danger?”
“Danger? Naw! Not a bit of it. If you stay below, you won’t even know that there’s been anything doing. Even if we run into a hurricane, which ain’t likely, we’ll be just as safe as if we were ashore. The Queen don’t need to worry about anything short of an island or a derelict.”
“A derelict?”
“Sure. A ship that has been abandoned at sea for some reason or other, but that ain’t been broken up or sunk. Derelicts are real terrors, all right.”
“Some of ’em float high; they ain’t so bad, because you can usually see ’em in time to dodge, and because they ain’t likely to be solid enough to do you much damage even if you do run into them. But some of ’em float low—just awash—and they’re just— Well, they’re mighty bad. They ain’t really ships any more; they’re solid bulks of wood.”
“I suppose they are all destroyed sooner or later?”
The little purser unconsciously struck an attitude. “A good deal later, sometimes,” he qualified. “Derelicts have been known to float for three years in the Atlantic, and to travel for thousands of miles. Generally, however, in the North Atlantic, they either break up in a storm within a few months, or else they drift into the Sargasso Sea and stay there till they sink.”
“The Sargasso Sea? Where is that? I suppose I used to know when I went to school, but I’ve forgotten.”