“Entirely, so that no big boats could go close. But he said there were passages where small boats could enter the lagoons.”
“Twelve hours journey north of Koshu,” repeated Olan, while making some mental calculations. “We must have been somewhere in that neighborhood when we were struck.”
“Oh, are we?” asked Nancy eagerly.
“We were,” he corrected. “Lord knows where we’re at now. A fair wind for forty-eight hours took us in the opposite direction.”
He pointed out where he surmised they had been sunk, and indicated the approximate direction in which the wind had taken them.
“I figure the group of reefs and islands you’re talking about is somewhere back here.”
“And northeast of Koshu,” she observed. “Wouldn’t it be safer to try to go back in that direction?”
“You’re optimistic, lady. Distances in a tub like this take a hundred times longer to cover than on our transport.”
“I know that. But we may as well be going somewhere definitely as drifting like this. We might even be able to locate the island where Tommy was marooned.”
“Any land, no matter what—a jungle would be a thousand times better than this,” said Hilda Newton.