the ship holds together, some seventy or eighty miles per day
nearer home must be placed to her credit? In like manner, it is
of the deepest comfort to know that, storm or calm, fair or foul,
the current of time, unhasting, unresting, bears us on to the
goal that we shall surely reach--the haven of unbroken rest.

Not the least of the minor troubles on board the CACHALOT was the
uncertainty of our destination; we never knew where we were
going. It may seem a small point, but it is really not so
unimportant as a landsman might imagine. On an ordinary passage,
certain well-known signs are as easily read by the seaman as if
the ship's position were given out to him every day. Every
alteration of the course signifies some point of the journey
reached, some well-known track entered upon, and every landfall
made becomes a new departure from whence to base one's
calculations, which, rough as they are, rarely err more than a
few days.

Say, for instance, you are bound for Calcutta. The first of the
north-east trades will give a fair idea of your latitude being
about the edge of the tropics somewhere, or say from 20deg. to
25deg. N., whether you have sighted any of the islands or not.
Then away you go before the wind down towards the Equator, the
approach to which is notified by the loss of the trade and the
dirty, changeable weather of the "doldrums." That weary bit of
work over, along come the south-east trades, making you brace
"sharp up," and sometimes driving you uncomfortably near the
Brazilian coast. Presently more "doldrums," with a good deal
more wind in them than in the "wariables" of the line latitude.
The brave "westerly" will come along by-and-by and release you,