An hour later Captain Scott and his mate, Stump, stood again together near the wheel. There were no lights except a dim lantern set in a deck bucket.
“Stump,” the captain said pleasantly, “how’d you like to be captain of the ‘Talofa’?”
The mate glanced up in surprise.
“You’ll have to be taught navigation,” the captain added. “That’s most all you need. A little chart reading and practice in picking your way among the reefs.”
“I navigated the ‘Pango’ from the Ellice Islands to Strong Island,” Stump reminded him.
“So you did,” Captain Scott replied.
“Well, maybe you’ll do,” he added, after a slight pause. He took the lantern out of the bucket and held it over the chart of the Kapuan Islands. Then he handed the lantern to Stump.
“Hold this,” he directed, “and I’ll give you a lesson in navigating.”
With parallel rulers, dividers and pencil, the captain laid down a line from a position he had made on the chart; then he transferred the line with the parallel rulers to the compass printed on the chart, and read the compass direction of the line.
“There’s where I figured we were at dark,” he said to the attentive Stump. “There’s the entrance to the reef at Saluafata, and that’s our compass course. Southeast, I make it.” Then he stepped off the distance with the dividers. “Fifteen miles it is.” He glanced over the side and then up at the slack canvas. “I guess we’re making about four knots, so about eleven o’clock we should be hearing the surf on the reef.”