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Updated: May 26, 2025
We had the boat's compass to steer by, but having no quadrant to take an observation or log-line to mark accurately the distance run, we could only guess at the rate we made. Mr Griffiths, however, was a good navigator, and was pretty certain that he was correct. We had, we fancied, plenty of food, but from the first he put us all on an allowance of water.
A boy went forward with a coil of rope on his arm, for the tide was running hard and the Garonne is no ladies' pleasure stream. It is not an easy matter to board a ship in mid-current when tide and wind are at variance, and the fingers so cold that a rope slips through them like a log-line.
The division of knots on the log-line bear the same proportion to a mile, as the twenty-eight or fourteen seconds of the glass does to an hour of time; so, if the four-knot mark be to hand, and the "long" glass be used, she is going four knots, or nautical miles, per hour.
From talk with my father, I knew the Ariadne of mythology, and so the sight of the patent log-line trailing in the creamy turmoil of our wake used always to suggest imaginings to me, as I leaned gazing over our poop rail, of a modern Theseus being rescued by this line of ours from the labyrinthine caverns of some submarine Minotaur.
He had, however, as yet no trustworthy means of reckoning longitude and no accurate gauge of distance traveled. The log-line was not invented until the 17th century, and accurate chronometers for determining longitude did not come into use until still later.
With the old hand-log, its line running out while the sand sped its way through the fourteen-seconds glass, the log-beaver might sometimes, by judicious "feeding" hurrying the line under the plea of not dragging the log-chip squeeze a little more record out of the log-line than the facts warranted; and Smith seemed to feel I might have done a little better for the watch and for the ship.
Gordon eased off the log-line, so that nothing should prevent it from running easily. "Up!" shouted Smith; and Gordon stopped the line. "Very well," added Peaks. "What's the mark?" "Ten and a quarter," replied the officer. "That sounds more like it. I knew this ship was going more than seven knots. You see, young gentlemen, you can't catch flies and tend the log-line at the same time.
Observing something like a handle projecting from a hole, he seized it, and hauled out a large wooden reel with a log-line on it. With this he at once began to play, dipping the log into the sea and hauling it up repeatedly as though he were fishing, but there was want of variety in this.
"No, sir never; but I've got a half-brother wot has bin in the Greenland whale-fishery, and I've bin in the South Sea line myself." "What line was that, Buzzby?" inquired David Summers, a sturdy boy of about fifteen, who acted as assistant steward, and was, in fact, a nautical maid-of-all-work. "Was it a log-line, or a bow-line, or a cod-line, or a bit of the equator, eh?"
Then hurrah! the wind would come out of the west, fresh, beautifully fresh, and send the Snark along, wing and wing, her wake bubbling, the log-line straight astern. At the end of half an hour, while we were preparing to set the spinnaker, with a few sickly gasps the wind would die away. And so it went.
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