Alan made a few figures with his pencil on a corner of the chart. “A point,” he said aloud, “is eleven degrees and fifteen minutes. One-eighth of that is one degree and twenty-four minutes. Every seventy-five miles we port one degree and twenty-four minutes.”
“Exactly,” replied the lieutenant, “and that’s why you’ve got to be right on your speed measurement. Then, knowing the distance covered, you can navigate by compass.”
“The machine is out here eatin’ her head off,” shouted Bob at this juncture. “Get a move on, youse ducks, I’ve wired the works to have lunch ready for us.”
“In a minute,” answered Ned. He turned to the engineer again. “Did you work out those distances and the time from St. Johns to New York by rail and steamer?”
In some of the preliminary talk on the possibilities of a transoceanic aeroplane service it had been suggested that the actual air flights be between Brow Head or Cape Clear in Ireland and St. Johns in Newfoundland. But the boys had been so busy on the new sky-craft that they had not gone into the shore ends of this suggestion.
“I’m afraid the company would beat itself by doing that,” answered the engineer. “However fast you flew from Cape Clear to St. Johns, you’d lose so much time by finishing the trip on land that the big liners would almost beat you in. It’s eighteen hundred and forty-five miles from St. Johns by rail through Nova Scotia up to Montreal and down to New York and the present train schedule calls for seventy-four hours to cover it.”
“How about rail to Halifax and then by steamer to Boston and New York?”
“Worse,” laughed the lieutenant. “That would take nearly eighty hours.”
“That settles it,” announced Ned picking up the barograph case. “It will be New York to London direct. We can’t afford to hustle over the Atlantic at two hundred miles an hour to lose one hundred and fifty miles an hour on a slow fifty mile an hour express train. Lieutenant,” he added affectionately, patting their skilled assistant on the shoulder, “we’ll be glad to see you to-morrow and we’ll do all the experimenting you suggest. But, sometime in the next six days, just piece out that ocean course and hook London and New York on the ends of it.”
“That’s almost what I’ll do in reality,” was the prompt answer of the engineer. “Until you figure it, you’d hardly believe that a direct east or true great circle sailing course between London and New York would pass over St. Johns. But it’ll come mighty close to it. The route I’ve projected,” he explained pointing to the sweeping curve on the chart, “if extended on the same lines, will pass just south of New York bay.”