crime ....

Just then there was a loud and assertive knock at the door, following which the burly and extremely displeased-looking figure of Captain Fitzgerald burst into the cabin with a dead albatross under his arm.

"You!" he hissed, indicating Crabtree and raising the bird’s carcass, "What the devil ...?"

Fitzgerald broke off his tirade, hastened over to Crabtree, grabbed the cabin boy’s ear lobe with his Diomedeidae-free hand and bellowed.

"Do you know what happened the last time someone shot an albatross aboard one of my vessels?"

"No, sir!", stammered Crabtree in reply.

Fitzgerald launched with furious enthusiasm into the tale of the Spaniel, which he had once captained and whose patron had considered the award-winning Harrison H3 marine chronometer too costly and cumbersome a piece of equipment to have on board his vessel.

The ship’s owner had encouraged Fitzgerald to use the mixed Polynesian stick chart (or mattang) and tried and disproven Lunar Distance Method method of longitude calculation. It was thus of no surprise that the ship and its crew later encountered themselves drifting, without the slightest stir of a breeze, somewhere, the captain asserted, in the South Seas.