'LOST IN THE BIRKENHEAD.'
Sometimes an amusing entry interrupts the silent pathos of these closed pages. 'Lost by Mr. Smith on the coast of Africa,' reads at first sight like a rather thin attempt of some one to shift the responsibility of his own carelessness on to the broad shoulders of Mr. Nobody. In reality it probably gives a hint of the necessary, dangerous, and exciting work of slave-dhow chasing which gives employment to our ships on the African coast. 'Mr. Smith' was no doubt a petty officer who was told off to carry the chronometer for a boat's crew sent to search for a slave-dhow up some equatorial estuary. Probably the dhow was found, and the Arabs who manned it gave so stout a resistance that 'Mr. Smith' and his men had other things to do than take care of chronometers before they could overcome them. We may take it that the real story outlined here was one of courage and hard fighting, not of carelessness and shirking.
Stories of higher valour and nobler courage yet are also hinted: the calm discipline of the crew of the Victoria as she sank from the ram of the Camperdown, the yet nobler devotion of the men of the Birkenhead, as they formed up in line on deck and cheered the boats that bore away the women and children to safety, whilst they themselves went down with the ship into the shark-crowded sea.
'There rose no murmur from the ranks, no thought
By shameful strength, unhonoured life to seek;
Our post to quit we were not trained, nor taught
To trample down the weak.
'What followed, why recall? The brave who died
Died without flinching in that bloody surf.
They sleep as well beneath that purple tide
As others under turf.'
CHAPTER VII
THE TRANSIT AND CIRCLE DEPARTMENTS
The determination of time is a duty the importance of which readily commends itself to the general public. It is easy to see that in any civilized country it is very necessary to have an accurate standard of time. Our railways and telegraphs make it quite impossible for us to be content with the rough-and-ready sun-dial which satisfied our forefathers. But it should be remembered that it was neither to establish a 'longitude nought,' nor to create a system of standard time, that Greenwich Observatory was founded in 1675. It was for 'The Rectifying the Tables of the Motions of the Heavens and the Places of the Fixed Stars, in order to find out the so-much-desired Longitude at Sea for the perfecting the Art of Navigation.'