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Updated: June 6, 2025
Our English friend had a way, quite peculiar to himself, of crowding upon his horse all his scientific and culinary instruments. He had suspended at the pommel of the saddle a thermometer, a rum calabash, and a coffee boiler, while behind the saddle hung a store of pots and cups, frying-pan, a barometer, a sextant, and a long spy-glass.
I forgot at once the cruel misgivings of the past night as I set to work to take my observations. What a blow awaited me! The sextant and chronometer had both been broken beyond repair, and they had been broken just this very night. They had been broken upon the night that Lys had been seen talking with von Schoenvorts. I think that it was this last thought which hurt me the worst.
"Ours was the Lizard; didn't you notice Cap'en Gillespie taking the bearings of it as we passed this afternoon?" "Yes, sir. I saw him with his sextant, as you told me that queer triangular thing was," said I; "but I didn't know what he was doing. I thought our starting-place was the Thames? We must have gone miles and miles since we left the Downs."
And immediately after breakfast, next morning, I got out my sextant, and, all hands of us landing upon the islet, we went to work with a will. First of all, I made my way to one of the masses of rock, and climbed up on it.
It would be tedious, and it is not necessary, to give a description of the survey which we afterwards made. We went over the same ground as before, and we surveyed with a musket in one hand and a sextant in the other, for the natives were not to be trusted. Our warlike friends at Tampassook did not much relish our re-appearance on their coast.
The principles of the steam-engine, too, he was familiar with, having been several months on board a steamboat, and made himself master of its secrets. He knew every lunar star in both hemispheres, and was a master of the quadrant and sextant. The men said he could take a meridian altitude of the sun from a tar bucket.
A hypsometer, or instrument for ascertaining the heights of the Lunar mountains by the barometric pressure under which water boils, a sextant to measure the altitude of the Sun, a theodolite for taking horizontal or vertical angles, telescopes, of indispensable necessity when the travellers should approach the Moon, all these instruments, carefully examined, were found to be still in perfect working order, notwithstanding the violence of the terrible shock at the start.
My baggage was light, consisting chiefly of provisions for two days; a small assortment of beads, amber, and tobacco, for the purchase of a fresh supply, as I proceeded; a few changes of linen and other necessary apparel, an umbrella, a pocket sextant, a magnetic compass, and a thermometer; together with two fowling-pieces, two pair of pistols, and some other small articles.
At eleven o'clock the mist ceased. "That's fortunate," Tom Virtue said; "I shouldn't be surprised if we get a glimpse of the sun between the clouds presently. Will you get my sextant and the chronometer up, Jack, and put them handy?"
The goods with which I had burdened them, consisted of 1,000 doti, or 4,000 yds. of cloth, six bags of beads, four loads of ammunition, one tent, one bed and clothes, one box of medicine, sextant and books, two loads of tea, coffee, and sugar, one load of flour and candles, one load of canned meats, sardines, and miscellaneous necessaries, and one load of cooking utensils.
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