Not the least curious to the uninitiated of the ways by which shipmasters navigate their vessels over the trackless wastes of ocean is that known to the navigator by the name of Great Circle Sailing. Lest the timid reader take alarm at the introduction of so high-sounding a technical term, let me hasten to assure him or her that I have no deep-laid designs upon innocent happiness by imposing a trigonometrical treatise upon them in the guise of an amusing or interesting story. To such baseness I cannot stoop, for one very good reason at any rate, because I have such a plentiful lack of trigonometry myself. Nevertheless, I do think that much more interest might be taken in the ways of our ships and their crews by the people of this essentially maritime nation than is at present the case if, in the course of sea-story telling, the narrators were not averse to giving a few accurate details as to the why and how of nautical proceedings.

Having, I trust, allayed all tremors by these preliminary remarks, let me go on to say that while all sane civilized persons believe this earth of ours to be more or less globular in shape, it probably occurs to but few that the shortest distance from point to point on a globe is along a curve. But in order to get any substantial gain out of this knowledge in the direction of shortening a ship’s passage, it is necessary first of all to have a considerable stretch of sea whereon to draw your curve, which is after all a straight line, since it is the shortest distance between two points. Even the fine open ocean between England and America is hardly sufficient to induce navigators to make use of Great Circle Sailing on outward or homeward passages, the gain being so small. When, however, the captain of an outward bound ship has wriggled through the baffling belt of hesitating winds that have hindered his progress southward from the equator to Cape, and begins to look for the coming of the brave westerly gales that shall send him flying before them to Australia or New Zealand, an opportunity occurs as in no other part of the world for putting the pretty Great Circle theory into practice.

It may be necessary to remind the reader that Great Circles are those which divide a globe into two equal parts, such as the equator and the meridians. If, then, the navigator at Cape in South America draws a thread tightly on a terrestrial globe between that point and, say, the south-east cape of Tasmania, the line it describes will be the arc of a Great Circle, and consequently the shortest distance between the two places. But when he comes to lay down the track which that thread has described upon his Mercator chart he finds that, instead of steering almost a straight course between the two places, he must describe a huge curve, with its vertex or highest southerly point well within the Antarctic circle. Now, no sane seaman would dream of seeking such a latitude upon any voyage but one of exploration, since it is well known what kind of weather awaits the unfortunate mariner there. But, without saying that Captain Jellico was a lunatic, it is necessary to remark that he was no ordinary shipmaster, and those who knew him best often prophesied that one day his persistent pursuit of hobbies and fads would involve him and all his unfortunate crew in some extraordinary disaster.

On the present voyage he commanded an ancient teak built barque that had long ago seen her best days, and was, besides, so slow that any of the ordinary methods of economizing time were a ridiculous waste of energy when applied to her. Of course, she carried stunsails, those infernal auxiliaries that are or were responsible for more sin on board ship than any other invention of man. She was bound to Auckland, and by the time she had waddled as far south as Cape had already consumed as many days as a smart clipper ship would have needed to do the whole passage. Yet Captain Jellico was so proud of the ugly old tub (bathing machine, the men called her), principally because he was half-owner of her, that he was perfectly blind to her slothful and unhandy qualities. Day by day he held forth to his disgusted mate upon the beauty of the Great Circle problem, and the desirability of putting it into practice, announcing his firm intention of carrying it out in its entirety this trip. He wasn’t going to piffle with any “composite” Great Circle track, not he. Half-hearted seamen might choose to follow the great curve down as far as 50° S. or so, and then shirk the whole business by steering due east for a couple of thousand miles, but he would do the trick properly, and touch the vertex, unless, indeed, it happened to be on the mainland of Antarctica. After an hour or two of this sort of talk the mate would go on deck feeling mighty sick, and muttering fervent prayers that his commander would meet with some entirely disabling accident soon, one that would effectually hinder him from carrying out his oft-reiterated intention. But no such answer was afforded to Mr. Marline’s impious aspirations. The steadfast westerly wind began as usual, and the clumsy old Chanticleer, under every rag of canvas, stunsails and all, began to plunder along that hateful curve, steering about south-east by south. Gradually the wind strengthened, until, much to the delight of the scanty crew, the fluttering rags that hung precariously at the yard-arms were taken in and stowed snugly away, the booms and irons were sent down from aloft, and lashed along the scuppers with the spare spars and stunsail carrying, for that passage, at any rate, became only a wretched memory. Sterner and stronger blew the wind as day succeeded day and higher latitudes were successively reached, until, although it was the Antarctic summer, all hands were wearing nearly every garment they possessed in the vain endeavour to keep a little warmth in their thin blood.

One topic now overlaid every other in the endless causeries that were held in the gloomy den where the sailors lived. It was the course steered. The position of the ship is always more or less a matter of conjecture to the men forward, except when some well-known island or headland is sighted, but all sailors are able to judge fairly well from the courses steered what track is being made, and the present persistence in a southerly direction was disquieting in the extreme to them all. The weather worsened every day, and occasional icebergs showed their awful slopes through the surrounding greyness, making every man strain his eyes when on the look-out or at the wheel in painful anxiety lest the ship should suddenly come full tilt upon one of them. A deep discontent was heavy upon the heart of every member of the crew, with the sole exception of the skipper. Snugly wrapped in a huge fur-lined jacket, and with an eared sealskin cap drawn down over his ears, he paced the poop jauntily, as merry as Father Christmas, and utterly oblivious of everything and everybody but the grand way in which he was following up his Great Circle. At last, when a dull settled misery seemed to have loaded all hands so that they appeared to have lost the heart even to growl, a dense mist settled fatefully down upon the ship, a white pall that was not dispelled again by the strong, bitter wind. The skipper hardly ever left the deck, but his almost sleepless vigilance had no effect upon his high spirits. Suddenly at mid-day, when by dead reckoning he was within a day’s sail of the vertex, the sea, which had been running in mountainous masses for weeks past, occasionally breaking over all and seething about the sodden decks, became strangely smooth and quiet, although the wind still howled behind them. Such a change sent a thrill of terrible dread through every heart. Even the skipper, with all his stubborn fortitude, looked troubled, and faltered in his unresting tramp fore and aft the poop. Then gradually the wind failed until it was almost calm, and the enshrouding mist closed down upon the ship so densely that it was hardly possible to see a fathom’s length away. The silence became oppressive, all the more so because underlying it there was the merest suggestion of a sound that always has a fateful significance for the mariner, the hoarse, unsatisfied murmur of the sea sullenly beating against an immovable barrier. And thus they waited and endured all the agony and suspense born of ignorance of the dangers that they knew must surround them, and utter incapability to do anything whatever. Full thirty-six hours crept leaden-footed away before there came any lightening of their darkness. Then gradually the rolling wreaths of mist melted away and revealed to them their position. At first they could hardly credit the evidence of their senses, believing that what they saw hemming them in on every side was but the reluctant fog taking on fantastic shapes of mountain, valley, and plateau. But when at last the wintry sun gleamed palely, and they could discern the little surf glittering against the bases of the ice-cliffs, all elusive hopes fled, and they became fully aware of their horrible position. The vessel lay motionless in a blue lake bounded on every side by white walls of ice, the snowy glare of their cliffs contrasting curiously with the deep blue of the sea. Some of the peaks soared to a height of over one thousand feet, others again rose sheer from the water for several hundreds of feet, and then terminated in flat table-like summits of vast area. But all were alike in their grim lifelessness. They looked as if they had thus existed for ages; it was impossible to imagine any change in their terrible solidity.

After the first shock of the discovery had passed, the relief that always comes from knowing the worst came to them, and they began to speculate upon the manner in which they could have entered this apparently ice-locked lake. Presently the skipper, in a strangely altered voice, ordered the long boat to be got out, a task of great difficulty, since, as in most vessels of the Chanticleer’s class, the long boat was, besides being hampered up by a miscellaneous collection of all the rubbish in the ship, secured as if she was never intended to be used under any circumstances. But the tough job gave the hands something to take their minds off their unhappy position, while the exertion kept off the icy chill of their surroundings. When at last the boat was in the water, although she was so leaky that one man was kept constantly baling, the skipper entered her, and, with four oarsmen, started to explore their prison. With the utmost caution, they surveyed every fathom of the sea line, no detail of the ice-barrier escaping their anguished scrutiny; but when at last, after six hours’ absence, they returned on board, they had been unable to discover the slightest vestige of a passage, no, not so much as would admit their boat. The only conclusion that could be arrived at was that they had passed in through the opening of a horseshoe-shaped berg of enormous area, and that another smaller berg had drifted in after them and turned over in the channel, effectually closing it against their return. Slowly and sadly they had returned to the ship, the skipper looking heartbroken at this tragic termination to his enthusiastic scheme of navigation. After ascertaining his position by means of an artificial horizon, he called all hands aft, and thus addressed them, “Men, we’m all fellow-sufferers now, I reckon, and the only thing to do ’es to wait God’s good time for lettin’ us get out. I find we’m in 61° S., 50° E., and I reckon our only hope lies in the fact that this can’t be no shore ice; it must be a floatin’ berg, ef ’tes a most amazin’ big un. Consequently it must be a driftin’ to the norrard a little; they all do, and sooner or later the sun ’ll melt us out. One good job, we got ’nough pervisions in the cargo ter las’ us six years, an’ as for water, well, I reckon there’s more fresh water froze around us than all the ships in the world ’ud ever want. So we’ll just take care of ourselves, try an’ keep alive,’n look after the old barky, for we shall certinly sail away in her yet.” His speech was received in silence, but all hands looked brighter and happier than they had done for a long time. They towed the vessel into a sort of cove, and moored her firmly with kedges and hawsers to the ice, then turned their attention to the invention of all sorts of expedients for preventing the time hanging too heavily. Better feeding became the order of the day, for the old man at once drew upon the cargo, which included an immense assortment of preserved food of the best brands, as well as many luxuries. And every day there was a slight change in the position, showing that, as the skipper had said, the whole body of ice was drifting north as well as east. So uneventfully and tediously two months passed away, leaving everything pretty much the same, except that the skipper seemed to have aged ten years.

Then one afternoon, when the enwrapped mist was so thick that even the deck beneath their feet was scarcely visible, there came a tremendous crash that made the old vessel quiver from keel to truck. It was followed by loud splashes as of falling blocks of ice, and strange sounds that resembled human voices. Presently the fog lifted, and revealed a great gap in the ice-wall just ahead of the vessel, and on one side of its cliffs the wreck of a splendid ship, whose crew were huddled upon the precipitous crags of the berg. The sight sent all hands into frantic activity on the instant. Toiling like giants, they rescued all the nearly frozen men, who were in such evil case that they could hardly ask whence their rescuers had come, and then, as if incapable of fatigue, they strained every ounce of strength they possessed to warp their long-imprisoned ship out of that terrible dock. Once escaped, it is hardly necessary to say that Captain Jellico lost no time in getting north and running his easting down upon a parallel of 42° S. Great Circle Sailing had lost all its charms for him. And in due time the Chanticleer arrived at Auckland, two hundred and forty-six days out from home, with all her passengers and crew in the best of health and mutually pleased with each other.