In these wartime years, with no pressure of maritime unemployment to drive hungry men into piracy, some furtive harbors throughout the Caribbean still nourished the old trade, and at some outwardly respectable ports a vessel of dubious virtue could still put in to dispose of this and that with few questions asked. So much had been common talk at Boston; Ben heard it again from the half-timid chatter of Joey Mills. Captain Shawn might have found men in those ports to make up his complement; he never went near one of them, all year long. Joey Mills dared to ask why, and shook his head and spat over the rail. "Tell you why," said Joey Mills, watching Ben with squirrely courage and making sure no one else could hear. "He'll get more men, _he_ says, from the fine prize we a'n't seen yet--or if we seen it we been evermore tacking somewheres else, God almighty damn. But this here ketch, Ben Cory, let alone it seems she a'n't bound for nowhere, she a'n't got nothing. Salt cod, God almighty damn. Put in at one of them places, nothing to trade, he'd be laughed at. _They'd_ give him salt cod, yah. I allow _he_ can't bear no laughing at--now don't betray me, don't never let it out I said no such of a thing--you wouldn't, boy?" Before Ben could even promise, he chuckled in apology and fled, and avoided Ben for days.... Far away ahead this midnight, over the curve of the world, stood the shoulder of Africa. Somewhere in the south--Ben gazed off idly to his right in the murmurous dark--down there beyond the Line, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the southern continent. Down there too--so far that one's thought hardly dared trouble with it--the wild cold legendary region of the Horn, Magellan's gateway, the path to the western sea. Here in the undemanding night Ben found it possible to command the earth to be not vast but small. Merely to point with the right arm toward the Horn--did not that reduce the world to a modest map that might be held in fancy, handled, contemplated?--never mind the thousands of leagues of open sea where that right arm was no greater than one splash of foam. The paradox was familiar. Mr. Gideon Hibbs had touched on it at the borders of philosophy: how, if the container be greater than the thing contained, that organ in the skull must be somehow wider than a galaxy.... The shadow coming slowly aft might be Manuel, ready to relieve Ben at the tiller. No--too soon, and Manuel was aloft. Moonrise had begun some while ago at Ben's left shoulder, magnificent and calm. The shadow was not Manuel but Daniel Shawn, prowling the dark as he often did when, as Ben supposed, he could not sleep. Ben suppressed a word of greeting. His arm over the tiller held firm with elastic readiness for all of the _Diana's_ whims, as Shawn himself had patiently taught him it must do. Captain Shawn stood a long time at the after rail gazing northwestward.