The taking of Departure, if not the last sight of the land, is,
perhaps, the last professional recognition of the land on the part
of a sailor. It is the technical, as distinguished from the
sentimental, "good-bye." Henceforth he has done with the coast
astern of his ship. It is a matter personal to the man. It is not
the ship that takes her departure; the seaman takes his Departure
by means of cross-bearings which fix the place of the first tiny
pencil-cross on the white expanse of the track-chart, where the
ship's position at noon shall be marked by just such another tiny
pencil cross for every day of her passage. And there may be sixty,
eighty, any number of these crosses on the ship's track from land
to land. The greatest number in my experience was a hundred and
thirty of such crosses from the pilot station at the Sand Heads in
the Bay of Bengal to the Scilly's light. A bad passage. . .

A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good,
or at least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it
does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her
bows. A Landfall may be good or bad. You encompass the earth with
one particular spot of it in your eye. In all the devious tracings
the course of a sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a chart
she is always aiming for that one little spot--maybe a small island
in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent,
a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain
like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters. But if you have sighted
it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good. Fogs,
snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain--those are the enemies
of good Landfalls.