Yankee captains who crowded on sail every hour in the twenty-four had soon out-raced stolid John Company’s ships in the Far East; but back in the seventeen-hundreds, before Maury had written on navigation, they thanked England for their sailing texts, and notably the “English Pilot,” printed by Messrs Mount & Page on Tower Hill, to show “the Courses and Distances from one Place to another, the Ebbing and Flowing of the Sea, the Setting of Tides and Currents.” “We shall say no more,” cry Mount & Page, “but let it commend itself, and all knowing Mariners are desired to lend their Assistance and Information towards the perfecting of this useful work.” Every inch of water is charted, the land invites with names of eld; the black letterpress, with the long lisping _s_, tells of the great Western Ocean, water and rim, from Barbary to Hispaniola, from Frobisher’s Meta Incognita to the “Icey Sea” of the Far South. There are burning mountains and cliffs, castles and towns, treacherous rocks and tides; and west of a certain “white mount” on Darien three peaks are sharply etched, and the legend, “Here hath been Gold found.” Due regard is had to eastern and western variation, and the line of no variation at all that springs from the coast of Florida; and it should be noted that Sir Thomas Smith’s Sound is “most admirable in this respect, because there is in it the greatest variation of the compass, that is in any part of the world, as was discovered ... by divers good observations made by that judicious artist Captain Baffin.” One Captain Davis, no less judicious, had observed the same phenomenon on his third voyage to the North in the year 1587. And those who sailed the Western Ocean had learned painfully other facts than variations of the compass: the sharp path about the doldrums, the way of Gulf Stream and trades, and of the great west winds that sent them bowling along through the Roaring Forties.