Captain Nelson grinned again. “It was so old,” he said, “that I thought I ’d better bend a new one.”
The Battles was shaking in the wind, and fell off on the other tack, and rounded under our stern. She shaved our stern so close that I could almost have reached out and grabbed the leach of her mainsail. She kept off with us on our course, but she was sailing nearly two feet to our one, and she drew ahead rapidly.
Before she had sailed our length Captain Coffin hailed again.
“Where ’you bound now?”
Captain Nelson waved his hand vaguely. “Oh, to the east’ard,” he said, “to the east’ard.”
“Western grounds, I suppose. We ’ll be waiting for you.”
CHAPTER XII
The first observation that the captain was able to take showed us to be in latitude 27° N., which was much farther south than he had any idea of. I was present when he worked out our position; I was supposed to be having a lesson in navigation, but I had no notion what he was doing, nor why. I remember that he could not believe it, and thought that he must have made a mistake, but a second observation confirmed the first, and I marked our position on the chart. I knew enough for that. That made our course northeast. Captain Nelson went on deck to give the new course, and left me alone with Bowditch. I struggled along for a few minutes, but I might as well have been blind for all the good I got out of the book. I thought I might as well be out in the sunshine, so I put the book under my arm, and went on deck.
Mr. Brown happened upon me as I sat on a coil of rope with the open book on my knee. It is not likely that I was even trying to read, but I was probably gazing out over the ocean, which I could just see at every roll of the ship, or up at the sky. He stooped and saw what I was at, and he smiled, and asked me how I was getting along. When I confessed that I was not getting along at all, he offered to help me, and I accepted gratefully. He could not help me then, for he was on duty; but later on he gave me my first idea of trigonometry. That was the beginning of my studies with Mr. Brown. He was an excellent teacher, and I was anxious to learn, which makes all the difference in the world.
It was four or five days later that we ran into the edge of the Sargasso Sea. We should have been clear of it by good rights, but the edge of the weed had been shifted into what should have been clear ocean, possibly by the very storm that we had come through. I knew, of course, that it must be the Sargasso Sea. I had read about it in my geography without much interest, and the teacher had not seemed much more interested than I, or to know much more about it.