A certain navigator from the Cape, we know, used his “Pilot” on sober trading voyages to the West Coast of Africa, or London, or the Spanish Main, and sailing days over pushed his great sea-chest back under the eaves of the trim house he had built after a rich voyage to Russia. He had sailed for pure love of churning blue water, and the sweep of wind through the rigging, and great clean distances, and a fine manly sense of mastering the tools of fate: wind and water and cloud, and men, and the job of making a good trade. Yet never had he been at sea that he was not homesick for the land, and his adventurous youth was no more than the price he paid for plenty ashore. He had met chance as it came and turned it to gold; and here in the “Pilot,” forgotten for a generation in the cavernous depths of his worm-eaten coffer, were notes for the story he had been too simple to read as romance. Its worn leather covers open out comfortably, and within, a cabin boy, perhaps, idling about while the master was on deck, had scrawled “Sloop Maremad of Boston,” and for another try “The Sloop Mairmad,” and knew his hornbook no better than a merman. Some leaves are burned through by a coal that smouldered there how many years ago, on this good sloop Mermaid, at a guess, in the year 1789, and silver-moths now plunge among the pages like cachalots in southern seas. When the captain had set out for Africa, with a cargo of cloth, iron kettles, and such-like trifles to barter for ivory and gold, the “Pilot,” by word and chart, painted the chances before him. Over there among the Cape Verdes lay Saint Jago, “rich in products, so that were it not for the continual Rains in the Times of the Travadoes, which render it unpleasant to the Inhabitants, it would without doubt be as delightsome an Island as any in the world”; and Garrichica, in the Canaries, is no winter port, for then “the grown Sea out of the North West comes running in there sometimes so forcible and strong, that it is not possible to hold a Ship, although she had ten Anchors out.” South and east now the sullen mainland lowers, and there “lying under the Tropick of Cancer,” is a country “high and stony, so that there is nothing to be had hereabouts, ... and with the Sun’s heat, continuing sometimes thirty and forty Days together ... it is so intolerable hot in the Valleys, that it blinds and deafens those that travel this Way.” But knowing skippers that “sail near this Coast, pass along, none go a-shore, for ’tis not worth their while.” At a shoal called “the Goulden Bark, much Fish is taken at sometimes of the Year,” and there’s trading at last on “the great River Senega”: “several Commodities, as Amber, Elephants Teeth, with Abundance of Wax and Skins.” But on Serbera is the Traders’ Paradise, whose delights the “Pilot” accentuates by a printer’s slip: “When you come into the heaven, you may anchor where you will, but commonly they run towards Madra Bombo, as being the chief Place for