As to the
direction we have been going in, it is always the same, and I have
been able to verify this by casual glances at the binnacle. If the
fore part of the vessel is barred to Warder Gaydon he has been allowed
a free run of the remainder of it. Time and again I have glanced at
the compass, and noticed that the needle invariably pointed to the
east, or to be exact, east-southeast.
These are the conditions in which we are navigating this part of the
Atlantic Ocean, which is bounded on the west by the coast of the
United States of America.
I appeal to my memory. What are the islands or groups of islands to
be found in the direction we are going, ere the continent of the Old
World is reached?
North Carolina, which the schooner quitted forty-eight hours ago, is
traversed by the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude, and this parallel,
extending eastward, must, if I mistake not, cut the African coast at
Morocco. But along the line, about three thousand miles from America,
are the Azores. Is it presumable that the _Ebba_ is heading for this
archipelago, that the port to which she belongs is somewhere in these
islands which constitute one of Portugal's insular domains? I cannot
admit such an hypothesis.
Besides, before the Azores, on the line of the thirty-fifth parallel,
is the Bermuda group, which belongs to England. It seems to me to be a
good deal less hypothetical that, if the Count d'Artigas was entrusted
with the abduction of Thomas Roch by a European Power at all, it was
by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
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