Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/145

Rh readers observed it, because nobody observed it. The story was a fiction, and with the right of an author of fiction I made this statement, which is unequivocally true.

I speak of this with a certain sensitiveness, because I have been accused of being a forger and counterfeiter for using such language. But it is one of the privileges of authors of fiction to make their narrative as plausible or probable as they can, if they give sufficient clues to the reader, from which he may know that he is reading fiction. In this case I began by placing the sup- posed action of part of the book on board a ship which had disappeared more than two years before. I knew that she had disappeared, the Navy Department knew she had disappeared, all well-informed readers knew that she had disappeared. Even among four thousand newspapers in the country the editors of two knew that she had disappeared. With my eyes open I intentionally gave this ready clue to any careful reader, that from the beginning he might know that the story was a parable ; and if there are any of such croakers left, as I suppose there may be in the office of one newspaper known to me, I will say to them that from the time of the Pharaohs down parable has been a method of instruction employed by teachers, even of the highest dis- tinction.

The Navy Department did not know where the Levant disappeared. All they knew was that Captain Hunt, of the Levant, was under orders to proceed as rapidly as possible from Hilo to the American coast, and that he started out to obey these orders, and the ship has never since been heard from by any trace whatever, unless it be in certain wreckage found on the south shore of Hawaii in June, 1861.

The Navy Department knew this, but I did not know it. I only knew that she had disappeared somewhere in the Pacific Ocean two years before.

To carry out the specific purpose to which I have alluded I meant to have these latitudes and longitudes indicate a spot high on the Andes, It was more than twenty years afterward that I found that in some accuracy of some proof-reader, possibly by some blunder of mine, the spot indicated is in the Pacific Ocean, where I did know she had disappeared. But alas the manu- script copy is lost and I cannot find who made this change. This is in point of fact not far from the Marquesan Islands, and, oddly enough, in the story Nolan is supposed to have been at those islands with Essex Porter. But I had nothing to do with this. I placed the ship on the Andes with the specific purpose which I have named.

I should perhaps have never discovered my own error but that many years ago my friend, James D. Hague, who knows the bottom of the Pacific better than I do the surface of the United States, called my attention to the instructions which Captain Hunt had on his last voyage in the Levant. I had never looked for those instructions, having no occasion to for my purpose. It seems that Mr Hague was in Honolulu at the time when the Levant sailed; that Hunt was his friend, and that they bade each other good bye on the day of her parting. As the reader knows, she was never again heard of but from the silent record of the spar which has been found on the island of Kaalualu. But Mr Hague has brought together in his interesting paper the evidence which shows that almost certainly Hunt intended to sail on a line nearly east from the Hawaiian Islands. In that region on any of the more recent atlases there is a spot of blue water. On Rand and McNally's elegant atlas of the world I find not a speck for thirty degrees of north latitude from the equator, for twenty degrees of latitude south of the equator. On the old Spanish charts, however, and on charts copied from them Mr Hague and the officers of ma-