But that we were not removed any considerable distance from the Line, seemed obvious.  For in the starriest night no sign of the extreme Polar constellations was visible; though often we scanned the northern and southern horizon in search of them.  So far as regards the aspect of the skies near the ocean’s rim, the difference of several degrees in one’s latitude at sea, is readily perceived by a person long accustomed to surveying the heavens.

If correct in my supposition, concerning our longitude at the time here alluded to, and allowing for what little progress we had been making in the Parki, there now remained some one hundred leagues to sail, ere the country we sought would be found.  But for obvious reasons, how long precisely we might continue to float out of sight of land, it was impossible to say.  Calms, light breezes, and currents made every thing uncertain.  Nor had we any method of estimating our due westward progress, except by what is called Dead Reckoning,—­the computation of the knots run hourly; allowances’ being made for the supposed deviations from our course, by reason of the ocean streams; which at times in this quarter of the Pacific rim with very great velocity.

Now, in many respects we could not but feel safer aboard the Parki than in the Chamois.  The sense of danger is less vivid, the greater the number of lives involved.  He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another.  In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.

Still, in the brigantine there were many sources of uneasiness and anxiety unknown to me in the whale-boat.  True, we had now between us and the deep, five hundred good planks to one lath in our buoyant little chip.  But the Parki required more care and attention; especially by night, when a vigilant look-out was indispensable.  With impunity, in our whale-boat, we might have run close to shoal or reef; whereas, similar carelessness or temerity now, might prove fatal to all concerned.

Though in the joyous sunlight, sailing through the sparkling sea, I was little troubled with serious misgivings; in the hours of darkness it was quite another thing.  And the apprehensions, nay terrors I felt, were much augmented by the remissness of both Jarl and Samoa, in keeping their night-watches.  Several times I was seized with a deadly panic, and earnestly scanned the murky horizon, when rising from slumber I found the steersman, in whose hands for the time being were life and death, sleeping upright against the tiller, as much of a fixture there, as the open-mouthed dragon rudely carved on our prow.

Were it not, that on board of other vessels, I myself had many a time dozed at the helm, spite of all struggles, I would have been almost at a loss to account for this heedlessness in my comrades.  But it seemed as if the mere sense of our situation, should have been sufficient to prevent the like conduct in all on board our craft.