“Pedro,” said the Admiral quietly, “what do you think?”

Pedro hesitated only an instant.  “My lord,” he answered boldly, “if we cannot go back we must go on—­around the world.”

“So we can,” smiled the Admiral.  “But it will not come to that.”  And Ruiz, reassured and rather ashamed of his fears, told the other grumblers if they had seen as much rough weather as he had they would know when they were well off.

But after a time even the pilots took fright.  The compass needle no longer pointed to the North Star, but half a point or more to the northwest of it.  They had visions of the fleet helplessly drifting without a guide upon a vast unknown sea.  It was not then known that the action of the magnetic pole upon the needle varies in different parts of the earth, but the quick mind of the Admiral found an explanation which quieted their fears.  He told them that the real north pole was a fixed point indeed, but not necessarily the North Star.  While this star might be in line with the pole when seen from the coast of Spain, it would not, of course, be in the same relative position when seen from a point hundreds of miles to the west.

On September 15 a meteor fell, which might be another omen—­nobody could say exactly what it meant.  Then about three hundred and sixty leagues from the Canaries the ships began to encounter patches of floating yellow-green sea-weed, which grew more numerous until the fleet was sailing in a vast level expanse of green like an ocean meadow.  Tuna fish played in the waters; on one of the patches of floating weed rested a live crab.  A white tropical bird of a kind never known to sleep upon the sea came flying toward them, alighting for a moment in the rigging.  The owners of the Pinta predicted that they would all be caught in this ocean morass to starve, or die of thirst, for the light winds were not strong enough to drive the ships through it as easily as they had sailed at first.  The Admiral, quite undisturbed, suggested that in his experience land-birds usually meant land not very far away.

Colon always answered frankly the questions put to him, but there was one secret which he kept to himself from the beginning.  Knowing that he would be likely to have trouble when he reached the seven-hundred-league limit his crews had set for him, he kept two reckonings.  One was for his private journal, the other was for all to see.  He took the actual figures of each day’s run as set down in his private record, subtracted from them a certain percentage and gave out this revised reckoning to the fleet.  He, and he alone, knew that they were nearly seven hundred leagues from Palos already, instead of five hundred and fifty.  According to Toscanelli’s calculation, by sailing west from the Canaries along the thirtieth parallel of latitude he should land somewhere on the coast of Cipangu; but the map of Toscanelli might be incorrect.  If the ocean should prove to be a hundred or more leagues wider than the chart showed it, they would have to go on, all the same.