world, for I know that Adventure is not dead. I know Adventure is
not dead because I have had a long and intimate correspondence with
Adventure.



CHAPTER IV--FINDING ONE'S WAY ABOUT



"But," our friends objected, "how dare you go to sea without a
navigator on board? You're not a navigator, are you?"

I had to confess that I was not a navigator, that I had never looked
through a sextant in my life, and that I doubted if I could tell a
sextant from a nautical almanac. And when they asked if Roscoe was
a navigator, I shook my head. Roscoe resented this. He had glanced
at the "Epitome," bought for our voyage, knew how to use logarithm
tables, had seen a sextant at some time, and, what of this and of
his seafaring ancestry, he concluded that he did know navigation.
But Roscoe was wrong, I still insist. When a young boy he came from
Maine to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and that was
the only time in his life that he was out of sight of land. He had
never gone to a school of navigation, nor passed an examination in
the same; nor had he sailed the deep sea and learned the art from
some other navigator. He was a San Francisco Bay yachtsman, where
land is always only several miles away and the art of navigation is
never employed.

So the Snark started on her long voyage without a navigator. We