To folks in a parlor on shore this may seem weak indeed, but I am
telling the story of a voyage alone.
I didn't touch the helm, for with the current and heave of the sea the
sloop found herself at the end of the run absolutely in the fairway of
the channel. You couldn't have beaten it in the navy! Then I trimmed
her sails by the wind, took the helm, and flogged her up the couple of
miles or so abreast the harbor landing, where I cast anchor at 3:30
P.M., July 17,1897, twenty-three days from Thursday Island. The
distance run was twenty-seven hundred miles as the crow flies. This
would have been a fair Atlantic voyage. It was a delightful sail!
During those twenty-three days I had not spent altogether more than
three hours at the helm, including the time occupied in beating into
Keeling harbor. I just lashed the helm and let her go; whether the
wind was abeam or dead aft, it was all the same: she always sailed on
her course. No part of the voyage up to this point, taking it by and
large, had been so finished as this.
[Footnote: Mr. Andrew J. Leach, reporting, July 21, 1897, through
Governor Kynnersley of Singapore, to Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial
Secretary, said concerning the _Iphegenia's_ visit to the atoll: "As
we left the ocean depths of deepest blue and entered the coral circle,
the contrast was most remarkable. The brilliant colors of the waters,
transparent to a depth of over thirty feet, now purple, now of the
bluest sky-blue, and now green, with the white crests of the waves
flashing tinder a brilliant sun, the encircling .
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