CHAPTER XXI
LAND HO!
The reckoning which Ben had inscribed on the bit of birchbark, later brought to Barnabee Beach, and which hangs over a Salthaven fireplace to this day, hadn't been accurate, of course, shrewd guess though it was. Ten days had elapsed since they had reached these waters, and they had circled, and tacked, and "gone about," between and around all the known islands that lie like emeralds, heavenly-soft, on the breast of the Carribean, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, and tiny Marie Galante, Rodonda, Nevis, and St. Kitts—all of the group which Captain Fairwinds knew like a book, and which, as the admiring Benson swore, with a pardonable exaggeration, the skipper could find if all compasses failed and the stars went out.
At eight bells of the tenth day—the eighteenth since they set sail—the skipper took another reckoning—62-46 West, it read, and 17-19, or thereabouts, North—no sail or strand in sight—and the North Star headed away from the outmost sentinel of the Leewards, on a course south-southwest.
"I wonder how the boy calculated that," said the skipper, scanning the horizon, "he must have kept a pretty level head. Remembered the last log entry, I suppose, counted the days
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