To
homeward-bound ships this is a great boon. No matter what the
weather may be--a stark calm or a gale of wind right on end in
your teeth--that vast, silent river in the sea steadily bears you
on at the same rate in the direction of home. It is perfectly
true that with a gale blowing across the set of this great
current, one of the very ugliest combinations of broken waves is
raised; but who cares for that, when he knows that, as long as
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.
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