“I remember the whaleship Essex,” the Ancient Mariner told Dag Daughtry.  “It was a cow with a calf that did for her.  Her barrels were two-thirds full, too.  She went down in less than an hour.  One of the boats never was heard of.”

“And didn’t another one of her boats get to Hawaii, sir?” Daughtry queried with all due humility of respect.  “Leastwise, thirty years ago, when I was in Honolulu, I met a man, an old geezer, who claimed he’d been a harpooner on a whaleship sunk by a whale off the coast of South America.  That was the first and last I heard of it, until right now you speaking of it, sir.  It must a-been the same ship, sir, don’t you think?”

“Unless two different ships were whale-sunk off the west coast,” the Ancient Mariner replied.  “And of the one ship, the Essex, there is no discussion.  It is historical.  The chance is likely, steward, that the man you mentioned was from the Essex.”

CHAPTER XIII

Captain Doane worked hard, pursuing the sun in its daily course through the sky, by the equation of time correcting its aberrations due to the earth’s swinging around the great circle of its orbit, and charting Sumner lines innumerable, working assumed latitudes for position until his head grew dizzy.

Simon Nishikanta sneered openly at what he considered the captain’s inefficient navigation, and continued to paint water-colours when he was serene, and to shoot at whales, sea-birds, and all things hurtable when he was downhearted and sea-sore with disappointment at not sighting the Lion’s Head peak of the Ancient Mariner’s treasure island.

“I’ll show I ain’t a pincher,” Nishikanta announced one day, after having broiled at the mast-head for five hours of sea-searching.  “Captain Doane, how much could we have bought extra chronometers for in San Francisco—­good second-hand ones, I mean?”

“Say a hundred dollars,” the captain answered.

“Very well.  And this ain’t a piker’s proposition.  The cost of such a chronometer would have been divided between the three of us.  I stand for its total cost.  You just tell the sailors that I, Simon Nishikanta, will pay one hundred dollars gold money for the first one that sights land on Mr. Greenleaf’s latitude and longitude.”

But the sailors who swarmed the mast-heads were doomed to disappointment, in that for only two days did they have opportunity to stare the ocean surface for the reward.  Nor was this due entirely to Dag Daughtry, despite the fact that his own intention and act would have been sufficient to spoil their chance for longer staring.

Down in the lazarette, under the main-cabin floor, it chanced that he took toll of the cases of beer which had been shipped for his especial benefit.  He counted the cases, doubted the verdict of his senses, lighted more matches, counted again, then vainly searched the entire lazarette in the hope of finding more cases of beer stored elsewhere.