‘Dow talk to us about where we’re to go,’ said Abram.
‘Talk to me, and I’ll advise you,’ said Tom, with his eyes upon the crowd beneath, folding his arms and standing erect.
‘You’re a navigator and know the world,’ exclaimed the sallow, ill-looking man with the hare-lip.
‘Aye, and I’ll counsel you when you’ve spoken and want advice,’ said Tom.
‘Where are we now?’ exclaimed a convict on the quarter-deck.
‘Shall I give it to you in parallels and meridians?’ answered Tom, with a sort of angry scorn in his voice. ‘You wouldn’t understand me. Suppose Mr. Bates brings you up a chart, there’s no room for hard upon two hundred and fifty heads to overhang it at once; and how many of you can read, that it should be passed around? Now listen: We’re in the middle of the ocean to the north of the Equator. Yonder,’ said he, pointing over the port beam, ‘many hundred leagues distant, is the Gulf of Guinea and the great bight of the African coast from Cape Formosa to Cape Frio.’
The convicts turned their heads all one way, staring like one man, some of them getting on their toes to look.
‘Yonder,’ continued Tom, pointing over the starboard beam, whereupon the heads of the convicts went round as before and all the poor, ignorant wretches stared as though by looking they’d see the land, ‘is the great Brazilian seaboard from Cape St. Roque to Rio Janeiro.’
I observed that Abram gazed at Tom with an indescribable smirking grin of admiration, as though struck by his familiar acquaintance with land entirely out of sight.
‘But my words,’ continued my sweetheart ‘give only a few who are educated amongst you any ideas. Yet I can tell you no more than this: That we are in the heart of the great Atlantic Ocean, and that a huge world for choice is spread on either hand, away in the Pacific by rounding Cape Horn and away in the Indian and Southern Oceans by rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Where shall I carry you to?’