"No, sir. You would steer in a northerly direction until you got between the parallels of thirty-five and forty-five degrees north latitude, and there you would find strong westerly winds to help you along. Perhaps you'd get some assistance from the North Pacific drift current, but on that point I am not sure."
"Well, it is just as well you are not," shouted Walter from the cabin, where he was busy with his chart. "The North Pacific drift current might help you if you wanted to go to Alaska from China. When it strikes the shores of our continent it divides, part of it flowing on down the coast and forming the California coast current, and the rest bending back across the Pacific again; so it would retard your progress rather than help you."
"Well, I am not the sailing-master of this craft, am I?" replied Eugene. "If I was, I'd keep posted. Besides, almost anybody with a chart before him, could clatter away as though his tongue was hung in the middle. Wait till Frank gets back if you want to talk about navigation."
"He's a good one, that's a fact," said Uncle Dick. "He's as fit to command a vessel as I am."
Just then Walter came up, having worked out a course, which being approved by the captain and given to the officer of the deck, the bow of the Stranger was brought around a point or two, and the voyage was fairly begun. There was nothing to be done now, but to await developments with all the patience they possessed.
But few incidents worthy of record happened during the voyage, which, after they struck the trade winds became monotonous enough. The schooner bowled along before a fine breeze, and as it was never necessary to change the sails, there was no work to be done except ordinary ship's duty. The Club passed the time mostly in reading and conversation with the trappers, who, as soon as they fully recovered from their sea-sickness, kept a constant lookout for some of those terrible dangers which had been so graphically described to them. By dint of much talking and argument the boys finally succeeded in making them take a more sensible view of their situation, and as the days wore away without bringing with them any of the perils they had expected to encounter, the backwoodsmen began to act a little more like themselves. But when an ignorant person once gets hold of an idea it is almost impossible to make him let go of it, and the trappers' minds could not be set wholly at rest. They steadily refused to go into the forecastle at night, and always slept on deck. The boys found the reason for this in a remark they heard Bob make to his companion. They wanted plenty of elbow room when they reached the under side of the earth, the old fellow said, so that when the schooner dropped off among the clouds, they could take to the water. They saw sharks, dolphins and flying-fish (the trappers began to put more faith in what the boys said after they had seen one of the latter rise from the water and sail through the air like a bird on the wing), and one day the sailors pointed out to them an object which made them believe that their time had come. It first showed itself while the boys were at dinner. They were summoned on deck by the officers of the watch, and found themselves close alongside the first whale they had ever seen. The monster was taking matters very leisurely, moving along about a hundred yards from the schooner, lifting his huge head out of the water now and then and spouting a cloud of spray into the air, and although the vessel was running at a rate of eight miles an hour, he kept pace with her without the least exertion. The boys were all disappointed.
"This must be a small one," said George.
"Small!" echoed Uncle Dick. "How big do you think a whale is, any how—as big as the Rocky Mountains?"
"No, sir; but I have read that they have been found sixty and seventy feet long," replied George.