So sailed the Ship of Fools—Michael playing with Scraps¹, respecting Cocky and by Cocky being bullied² and wheedled³, singing with Steward⁴ and worshipping him; Daughtry drinking his six quarts of beer each day, collecting his wages the first of each month, and admiring Charles Stough Greenleaf as the finest man on board; Kwaque serving and loving his master and thickening and darkening and creasing⁶ his brow with the growing leprous infiltration⁷; Ah Moy avoiding the Black Papuan as the very plague, washing himself continuously and boiling his blankets once a week; Captain Doane doing the navigating⁸ and worrying about his flat-building in San Francisco; Grimshaw resting his ham-hands on his colossal⁹ knees and girding at the pawnbroker¹⁰ to contribute as much to the adventure as he was contributing from his wheat-ranches; Simon Nishikanta wiping his sweaty neck with the greasy¹¹ silk handkerchief and painting endless water-colours; the mate patiently stealing the ship’s latitude¹² and longitude¹³ with his duplicate key; and the Ancient Mariner¹⁴, solacing¹⁵ himself with Scotch¹⁶ highballs, smoking fragrant¹⁷ three-for-a-dollar Havanas that were charged to the adventure, and for ever maundering about the hell of the longboat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom¹⁸ under the sand.  
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other stretches of ocean and unidentifiable from them.  No land broke the sea-rim.  The ship the centre, the horizon was the invariable and eternal circle of the world.  The magnetic needle in the binnacle was the point on which the Mary Turner ever pivoted¹⁹.  The sun rose in the undoubted east and set in the undoubted west, corrected and proved, of course, by declination, deviation²⁰, and variation; and the nightly march of the stars and constellations²¹ proceeded across the sky.
 
And in this stretch of ocean, lookouts²² were mastheaded at day-dawn and kept mastheaded until twilight²³ of evening, when the Mary Turner was hove-to, to hold her position through the night.  As time went by, and the scent²⁴, according to the Ancient Mariner, grow hotter, all three of the investors²⁵ in the adventure came to going aloft.  Grimshaw contented²⁶ himself with standing²⁷ on the main crosstrees.  Captain Doane climbed even higher, seating himself on the stump²⁸ of the foremast with legs a-straddle of the butt²⁹ of the fore-topmast.  And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away from his everlasting³⁰ painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky such as are painted by seminary maidens³¹, to be helped and hoisted³² up the ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two grinning, slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed³³ him squarely on the crosstrees and left him to stare with eyes of golden desire, across the sun-washed sea through the finest pair of unredeemed binoculars³⁴ that had ever been pledged in his pawnshops.
 
“Strange,” the Ancient Mariner would mutter, “strange, and most strange.  This is the very place.  There can be no mistake.  I’d have trusted that youngster of a third officer anywhere.  He was only eighteen, but he could navigate³⁵ better than the captain.  Didn’t he fetch the atoll after eighteen days in the longboat?  No standard compasses, and you know what a small-boat horizon is, with a big sea, for a sextant.  He died, but the dying course he gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very next day after I hove his body overboard.”
 
Captain Doane would shrug³⁶ his shoulders and defiantly³⁷ meet the mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
 
“It cannot have sunk, surely,” the Ancient Mariner would tactfully carry across the forbidding pause.  “The island was no mere³⁸ shoal or reef.  The Lion’s Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five feet.  I saw the captain and the third officer triangulate it.”
 
“I’ve raked and combed the sea,” Captain Doane would then break out, “and the teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let slip through a four-thousand-foot peak.”
 
“Strange, strange,” the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to his cogitating³⁹ soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers.  Then, with a sudden brightening, he would add:
 
“But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane.  Have you allowed for the change in variation for half a century!  That should make a grave difference.  Why, as I understand it, who am no navigator, the variation was not so definitely and accurately⁴⁰ known in those days as now.”
 
“Latitude was latitude, and longitude was longitude,” would be the captain’s retort.  “Variation and deviation are used in setting courses and estimating dead reckoning.”
 
All of which was Greek to Simon Nishikanta, who would promptly⁴¹ take the Ancient Mariner’s side of the discussion.
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