Free And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi, Bruce Henderson Page B

and use the navigation book to translate the sextant’s number into a formula based on several factors, including the season of the year and the exact time of day. Finally, she drew a “line of position” on a chart of the central Pacific. “Of course,” the book offered helpfully, “this is not a line of position as much as a curve or circle of position. What you are measuring is the geographical position of the sun at the time of your sighting.” Right.
    Four hours later, she repeated the process. She extended the first line of position until it met on the chart with the latest one. Where the two lines crossed was supposed to be their current position. But every time Jennifer saw the haywire result of her careful work staring up at her, she felt like throwing the sextant and book overboard.
    They were lost .
    She fought to push back her feelings of desperation. She could figure out this problem. She had to. She’d taken math in college, she had confidence in her analytical abilities. She was a capable woman, not a helpless damsel in distress. She went back to the celestial navigation book again and again, trying to find her mistake, but the solution continued to elude her.
    On their tenth morning at sea, with Buck on deck at the helm, Jennifer had no sooner awakened than the realization stunned her. North, not south! She reached for her navigation book. Somehow, she had assumed all this time that she was supposed to be using the logarithm for south latitude. That’s where they were headed. But she woke up realizing that was wrong. They were north of the equator.
    Her novice’s mistake had been understandable. As her guide confirmed, the north logarithm was for use above the equator, where they were. She excitedly spread out the chart and did some quick figuring, using the previous day’s sightings. The position she came up with looked probable, unlike her others, but she wanted to be certain. Three hours later, after two new sightings, Jennifer pointed to a spot on the chart and proudly told Buck: “That’s where we are—halfway to Palmyra.”
    Buck hugged and kissed her. His relief was obvious, and it occurred to Jennifer that he’d been more worried about the uncertainty of their position than his sense of machismo had permitted him to let on. But they weren’t home free, yet. From her library research, Jennifer knew that Palmyra’s low-slung islets could only be seen from within six to eight miles, making it easy even for the most deadeye navigator to miss the atoll completely.
    It wasn’t long before Jennifer discovered a new worry: running out of food if and when they found Palmyra. Take the sugar supply. She had planned to use it only for baking, since neither she nor Buck used it in coffee or tea or on cereal. But Buck was now being extravagant with the sugar, feeling it might help him regain his energy. And he was imploring Jennifer to bake, because bread and biscuits would be likely to settle his stomach. The supplies were dwindling at an alarming rate. As for her own diet, Jennifer drank cups of black coffee morning and afternoon and ate one light meal a day, usually in the evening. A year or so before she met Buck, she had put on a lot of weight—ballooning to 170 pounds. To take off fifty pounds, she had cut down to one meal a day and become a vegetarian. She still seldom ate meat. Planning to supplement their food en route to Palmyra with fish, and once on the island, to eat fish as the mainstay of their diet, they had brought along fishing poles, reels, hooks, lines of various test weights, even a spear gun. But so far, they hadn’t managed a single catch, other than a bony little flying fish that sacrificed itself by crash-landing on the deck. So much for their dreams of fresh mahi-mahi or tuna or bluefin along the way. Although Jennifer had only fished a couple of times in her life, Buck had claimed to be an expert angler. She hoped his inability to catch anything so far wasn’t an