“Here is a book you might enjoy,” Than tells Adams. They are sitting in Than’s cabin, sipping tea.
Adams picks up the book. The Philosophy of Hegel. He thinks of Jurgen and laughs. “Why?” he says.
“For Hegel, Reason is the generating principle of the universe. A philosophy compatible with your thoughts.”
“Maybe.” Adams smiles.
“In Vietnam men sometimes hold hands in public — it’s part of friendship, an accepted custom. Americans can never get used to that. It unsettles them. This book.” He taps Hegel. “Affected me the same way. My introduction to the West.”
Adams laughs. “If you’re going to practice science here, Than, you’ll have to adopt a Western bias. You’ll have to trust objective methods.”
“I do. But there are problems with that.”
“Like what?”
He thinks for a moment. “Let’s say that you and I are walking down a street and we see — what? A television antenna on a building, all right? How tall is it? From a distance of two kilometers it appears to have one height. If we move closer, it appears to be taller.”
“So we measure it.”
“With a notched tape, standing next to it. Is that an accurate measure?”
“I see what you’re saying,” Adams interrupts. “What gives the tape authority?”
“Exactly. Our standards are someone’s invention. How tall is the antenna? One meter. What is one meter? The length of this tape. What is the length of this tape? The height of the antenna.”
“But we agree on the standards.”
“Still, they exclude a wide range of perceptions. We know our own knowing, that’s all. Interpretation is all we have.”
Adams shakes his head. “I interpret from the growling in my stomach that I’d rather eat than talk.”
Than laughs. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?”
They rise. “There’s something about the fog and the cold,” Adams says. “Turns you inward.”
“Where you find the center.”
Sea stories: after supper several members of the crew leave the galley, walk up the companionway stairs, and stand on the poop deck, smoking. “Sailing alone does funny things to a man,” says one. “I tried it once. Eight days out to sea, I heard voices saying, ‘Go back to land.’”
“You know the story of Joshua Slocum, don’t you?”
The crewmen nod.
“We don’t,” Carol says.
“Slocum was a down-and-out sail captain, couldn’t find no work ‘cause the steamer’s so popular. He sets out on an old oyster sloop named Spray, aimin’ to be the first man to sail around the world by himself.”
“He done it, too,” says the first speaker.
“Yeah, but three days out to sea he got the cramps. He’d been eatin’ plums and cheese. So he goes below, sits there sick at his stomach, and finally falls asleep. When he wakes up, he can feel 01’ Spray heaving into the wind. He crawls up top and there’s an old man with a red cap at the helm. He says he’s the captain of the Pinta and he’s come to guide the ship. Then he lays into Slocum for mixing plum with cheese. ‘White cheese is never safe unless you know where it comes from,’ he says. Slocum faints again, and the next day he sees he’s still on course. To the end of his life he claimed what he saw was real. ‘I’s grateful to the old pilot,’ he said, ‘but I wondered why the hell he didn’t take in the jib.’”
After two weeks at sea, Adams has become a meteorologist of sorts. Though the ship receives broadcasts from the United States National Weather Service, he prefers to make his own predictions. He listens to weather broadcasts on the AM band, sketches maps from day to day, noting cold fronts, warm fronts, high and low pressure systems, wind direction, and tern-perature changes. Using this data, combined with fog readings, Adams has learned to spot weather trends and is quite proud of himself, though the crew laughs at his enthusiasm.
He is particularly good at predicting winds. At an altitude of three thousand feet, wind direction parallels the prevailing weather system, and on the ocean the wind is two thirds the velocity of high-altitude currents.
Adams walks out on deck, says casually but confidently, “Wind’s going to pick up tonight.”
The sailors bundle up and laugh.
After supper one evening (green beans, roast beef, banana pudding), Adams checks his charts, predicts high winds. That night he is awakened by cats screaming. Shortly afterwards, “Aloft and stow!” He is thrown violently against the hull. He tries to stand, cannot. People yelling from their quarters. Finally he makes it to the door. The crew is running in the hold, water pouring down the companionway. He cannot get his balance. The captain announces that Desire Provoked has hit gale force winds (isn’t it the other way around, Adams wonders). Everyone is ordered to remain belowdecks until further notice. Carol crawls out of her cabin. She huddles with Adams at one end of the hold. She’s sick. Adams grips her waist as she coughs and spits. Than brings her a towel from his cabin.
The storm continues through the night. The following morning, calm water. Desire Provoked sails limply, tattered, tilted at an angle. The compass is shattered; the Loran-C receiver is out.
The pilot tells the captain they’re off course.
“How much?”
“It’ll take a while to determine our position. Without the Loran it’s largely guesswork. The RDF’s still working — ”
“We’re too far out to receive signals.”
Desire Provoked drifts for a day and a half. Heavy fog. On the second day an object appears on the horizon. With their instruments out, the crew cannot determine their distance from it. Adams knows that if he can figure the object’s height, and his own height above water, he can calculate the range of visibility between it and him. Using a hand-held compass and a divider, he estimates the object’s height.
He determines the height of his eye above water, estimates his own range of visibility. Then he adds the two results to determine the approximate distance between the object and the ship. Hastily he sketches a Circle of Position chart (where every object on its circumference is equidistant from the center of the circle). With a sextant he measures vertical angles, smooths his drawing compass across the chart.
He points to a spot in the ship’s atlas. “We’re here. Not far from where we were.”
Studying the atlas, he presumes the object to be a lighthouse on the coast of Bear Island. He thumbs through the Light List. The Bear Island lighthouse has a Fixed and Flashing light, red to green.
“That would explain why we’ve seen no light,” says the captain. “In bad weather, red and green are harder to see than white.”
Adams also discovers in the Light List that the tower contains a radio beacon. He switches on the RDF and receives a signal. Desire Provoked is, indeed, off the southwest coast of Bear Island, another day from Svalbard.
“Very impressive,” Than says.
Adams laughs. “We agreed there’s no true standard of measurement.”
“In a manner of speaking. But you did determine our position.”