I'd have trusted that youngster of a third officer anywhere.

He was only eighteen, but he could navigate better than the captain.

Didn't he fetch the atoll after eighteen days in the longboat?
No standard compasses, and you know what a small-boat horizon is, with a big sea, for a sextant.

He died, but the dying course he gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very next day after I hove his body overboard." Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet the mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
"It cannot have sunk, surely," the Ancient Mariner would tactfully carry across the forbidding pause.

"The island was no mere shoal or reef.