And this did call for patience, for the hurricane continued for fully a week. Meanwhile the Orion ran on under almost bare poles, and in a northwesterly direction. This course, Captain Sproul believed, would bring them to Bering Sea, and their homeward route.
But a vast and amazing discovery awaited the hardy navigator of the whaling bark when the wind finally died down, the clouds were swept away, and the sun again appeared. Professor Henderson appeared on deck, too, and calculated their position side by side with Captain Sproul. The latter's amazement was unbounded. His calculations, no matter how he worked them, made the position of the Orion 148 degrees west of Greenwich and 49 degrees north.
In other words, he was far, far south of the Alaskan Peninsula. During this awful storm he had traversed (or so he was bound to believe) a long stretch of the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea and Strait, had passed the Aleutian Islands, and was now more than a thousand miles south of the position of the Orion when she first became stranded.
The professor endeavored to explain to him again what had really happened—that the fragment of the earth on which they had been marooned had plunged into the old earth again, landing by great good fortune in the empty sea between North America and Asia—in the North Pacific.
Such an explanation seemed utterly ridiculous to Captain Sproul, to his seamen, and even to Phineas Roebach. They were convinced that Professor Henderson was in his dotage. They would rather believe that the Orion, sailing on pretty nearly a straight course according to the compass, had traversed this enormous distance during the hurricane.
The professor and his young friends, however, had studied too deeply the mystery of this astounding affair to be mistaken. All the phenomena of the experience had been noted by Professor Henderson. He had the material of a most remarkable work in his notebooks, and that volume will soon appear to delight the scientific world.
Meanwhile the Orion changed her course and ran for San Francisco to re-provision. She had a very valuable cargo of oil which she would later take around the Horn to her home port, New Bedford.
At San Francisco, however, Professor Henderson, Jack and Mark, with Andy and Wash and Phineas Roebach, left the ship. Roebach was to report to his oil company and probably return to Alaska to continue his search for petroleum. Our friends started overland for home, stopping off at the city where Dr. Artemus Todd resided to explain to that savant the reason for their inability to secure a single specimen of the Chrysothele-Byzantium, which herb the doctor was so confident would be of incalculable value in treating patients suffering from aphasia, amnesia, and kindred troubles.
Perhaps the disappointed doctor was not entirely sure that his friend, Professor Henderson, and his comrades, had gone through the strange experience which they recounted. But a few weeks later several vessels reported sighting a new island in the North Pacific, south of the Alaskan Peninsula. On this island men who landed discovered a colony of Kodiak bears, some Arctic foxes, and the remains of vegetation which had never before been found south of the Arctic Circle.
This discovery created vast talk among the geographers and scientists. An exploring party was sent out by the Smithsonian Institution to examine the new island. It was pronounced of volcanic origin, yet the formation of it was not of recent time. There was on this island (which contained several square miles) the remains of a glacier, and in the ice the party discovered the wreck of a wonderful flying machine, which had evidently been built within a few months.