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Updated: May 7, 2025
It's either that or the chronometer's gone wrong, or I've forgotten my navigation." "It must be the chronometer, sir," the mate reassured his owner. "You know I made separate sights and worked them up, and that they agreed with yours." "Yes," Grief muttered, nodding glumly, "and where your Summer lines crossed, and mine, too, was the dead centre of Leu-Leu Atoll.
Two degrees and fifteen minutes south, the observation gave them. With a broken chronometer longitude was out of the question. "We're anywhere within five hundred and a thousand miles along that latitude line," Grief remarked, as he and the mate bent over the chart. "Leu-Leu is to the south'ard somewhere, and this section of ocean is all blank.
Finding the skipper down with a particularly bad stroke of fever, Grief had relieved him and taken the Uncle Toby on her semiannual run to the atolls. He had elected to make his first call at Leu-Leu, which lay farthest, and now found himself lost at sea with a chronometer that played tricks. No stars showed that night, nor was the sun visible next day.
With a last long scrutiny at the unbroken circle of the sea, David Grief swung out of the cross-trees and slowly and dejectedly descended the ratlines to the deck. "Leu-Leu Atoll is sunk, Mr. Snow," he said to the anxious-faced young mate. "If there is anything in navigation, the atoll is surely under the sea, for we've sailed clear over it twice or the spot where it ought to be.
It's thickening up, and I don't imagine we can get a star observation to-night; so we'll just hold our weather position, get a latitude sight to-morrow, and run Leu-Leu down on her own latitude. That's the way all the old navigators did."
The whole voyage has been crazy. Will you kindly go up, Mr. Snow, and see what's ailing Jackie." "It's land all right," the mate called down a minute afterward. "You can see it from the deck tops of cocoanuts an atoll of some sort. Maybe it's Leu-Leu after all." Grief shook his head positively as he gazed at the fringe of palms, only the tops visible, apparently rising out of the sea.
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