More of the tang of salt air and of the romance of the ocean came one evening in the next drill season when the division mustered in the parlor to listen to a talk by Professor Henry Ferguson of Trinity College, an honorary member, who told a thrilling tale of shipwreck in the mid-Pacific. Professor Ferguson recited the story of the Hornet, a clipper which sailed from New York in 1866 for San Francisco. When the ship was several hundred miles off the Galapagos fire obliged the crew to take to the three boats, which were provisioned for ten days. It was decided to head for the north, to keep in the track of San Francisco vessels. Merchantmen in those days adhered to Maury’s sailing directions and it was reasoned that chances would be better in the sea highway than in attempting to reach land. By day the heat was nearly intolerable. Nights were treacherous as they induced squalls of the vindictively sudden nature peculiar to those Equatorial waters. Day after day wore by with an unbroken horizon. Finally the boats crawled up into the trade winds. It was decided to separate the boats to increase the chance of finding aid. For twenty-five days the sailors had fought wind, sun, and water and now they were in danger of fighting starvation, the ten days’ provisions, which had been distributed into one-third allowances, being nearly exhausted. The remaining provisions were in turn re-divided, but were gone in a fortnight. The men surviving sought nourishment in the chewing of leather and moist clothing. On the point of utter exhaustion they made a landfall, which proved to be Hawaii, and were rescued by a crew from a coasting station. They had spent forty-three days in an open boat and had traveled nearly three thousand miles. More of the romance of the sea came to the division when the story of a “war member,” William Hurd, and the schooner Intrepid was told. Less than a month after Professor Ferguson’s lecture, Hurd cleared in New York with his little auxiliary as a trader to carry trinkets, tin jewelry, Yankee notions, canned soups, linens and whatnot to Baranquila and to acquire cocoanuts and rubber on the Mosquito Coast and islands nearby. His auxiliary was sixty-one feet on the water line and eighteen feet beam and thirty-five gross tonnage, or twenty-eight net. She had a powerful gasoline motor. After she cleared, Colombian insurrectionists captured Baranquila and Hurd’s friends in the division began to wonder what would happen to their former shipmate if an insurrecto officer ranged alongside with more of an appetite for grindstones, canned soups and tin jewelry than for international law. But Hurd was able to take care of himself. He prospered as a trader, made a bushel of money, spent it and finally returned.