“Looks to me as if we were going to have the best kind of weather,” remarked Fred to the mate, on the second day out.
“I hope so,” answered Nat Brooks. “But I’ll tell you more about it later.”
“Why? Do you think there is a storm approaching?” questioned the youngest Rover boy quickly.
“I know we’re getting into waters where you can’t tell much about anything,” was the reply. “You know the old saying, don’t you, about the calm before the storm? Well, this may be such a calm. If you’ll notice, there’s scarcely a breath of air stirring. If it wasn’t that we have our engines going, we wouldn’t be making any sort of headway.”
“Yes, I noticed there wasn’t much wind. I hope it doesn’t blow too hard. We were wrecked down here once, and I wouldn’t like to be wrecked again.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, lad. The Firefly is a staunch yacht, with first-class engines, and it would take nothing short of a hurricane to send her over or on to the rocks.”
With so little to do, the boys spent quite some time looking over the charts and maps which Captain Corning and the old sailor, Henry Swall, had drawn up in trying to locate the sunken Margarita.
“Here is a chart of the northern coast of the state of Yucatan, Mexico,” said Captain Corning. “As you can see, this state is really at the upper end of Central America and directly on the southern coast line of the Gulf of Mexico. In the center of the Gulf, the water is very deep—two or three miles, in fact. But along the coast of Yucatan it shallows rapidly, and there are many sandbars and rocky elevations where the water is less than a hundred feet in depth. Now, Henry Swall was pretty sure that the Margarita went down on a sandbar opposite the village of Vera Sura, a place which was afterwards burned and which has since been abandoned. According to this latest chart, which is a Mexican document, the water there is not over forty or fifty feet in depth. If that is so, we ought not to have any great difficulty in locating the wreck, providing, of course, the shifting sandbars haven’t covered her.”
“If this chart was made by the Mexicans within the last few years, wouldn’t they be liable to find the wreck in making their soundings?” questioned Jack quickly.
“They might, lad. But I’ve made careful inquiries concerning that, and I can find no government report of the Margarita having been located.”