"What the hell does that mean?" van Hoek demanded.

"She sails upside-down. She leaps from place to place and her form shifts, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver trapped between sea and sky."

Jack found this marvelously poetickal, but van Hoek was all ready with a tedious explanation: "Tell him he is only seeing a mirage. It might be another ship that lies over the horizon, or it might be a reflection of our own vessel. But there is probably not another ship within two thousand miles of us, and so it is most likely the latter."

But every man who was not busy with something else ascended the ratlines and got in position to view this entertainment. Jack got up sooner and higher than most. As a shareholder, he slept in a cabin instead of belowdecks, and as an Englishman he kept his windows open unless there was a positive hurricane blowing, and he had escaped the never-ending round of catarrhs, influenzas, rheumatic malfunctions, and fœbrile disorders that eddied through the crew. At any rate he had more energy and better lungs than they did and so he climbed all the way to the topmast trestletrees: high enough that he could take in Minerva's whole length at a glance. At first the mirage was not visible, but van Hoek said that this was the common way of mirages and to be patient. So while he was being patient in the topmast trestletrees, Jack looked down at the crew, struggling up the ratlines and coughing, spitting, and scratching themselves just like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the show to begin. This was not such a bad similitude either. From the point of view of a drawing-room Princess, Minerva had vanished underneath a florid mermaid-cartouche. But from Minerva's point of view, it was the world that had disappeared—somewhat as players do when the story pauses between acts. With their wigs, costumes, swords, and stage-props they exeunt; nothing happens for a while; the audience shifts, mutters, farts, cracks hazel-nuts, hawks up phlegm; and if it is a better class of theatre, there begins a little play-within-the-play, an entr'acte.

"Mira!" someone shouted, and Jack looked up to see it.

The phantom-ship appeared to be no more than a cannon-shot away from them. At times it appeared quite normal and solid. Then it would split into two symmetrical images, one right-side-up and one upside-down, or it would warp and flit about, like a drop trapped between panes of glass and being moved hither and thither by the pressure of a finger.

But when it was solid and stable for a moment, it was obviously not Minerva but some other ship. It had men on it, and they had trimmed her sails to run before the wind, just as Minerva was doing. Several of them had climbed into her rigging to gawk and point at something.

"Does she have any cannon run out?" van Hoek inquired.

"It would be a strange part of the world to go a-pirating," said Dappa.

"Hmph!"

"She is running up a flag," said Moseh de la Cruz. "She must see us, as we see her!"

Red silk bloomed in the mirage, a sudden billowing of flame. In the middle of it a gold cross and some other heraldic designs. Every man sighed at once.

"It is the Manila Galleon!" Jack announced.

At this news van Hoek finally bestirred himself. He climbed to the maintop and began trying to fix his spyglass on the mirage, which was like trying to spear a flea with a jack-knife. There was a certain amount of cursing in Dutch. Jack had spent enough time with van Hoek to know why: For all her bulk and shoddy construction, the Manila Galleon had not only survived; she had come through the storm in better condition than Minerva, or at least without losing any of her masts.

After that it hailed for two straight days. One of the older sailors remarked that hail never occurred far from land. The wind came about into their teeth, and as they'd been pushed by inscrutable currents dangerously close to thirty-five degrees, they had no choice but to sail northwest for a day. When the weather cleared and the trade-wind returned, and they were able to steer towards California again, someone sighted a school of tunny fish. All agreed that tunny never ventured far from land—all except for van Hoek, who only rolled his eyes.

The day after that they once again caught sight of the Manila Galleon in a mirage. This time—though the image was fleeting and warped—they saw a jab of flame, which probably meant that the Galleon had fired a cannon in an effort to signal them. All hands shushed each other, but if any sound reached Minerva it was drowned out by the shushing. Accordingly van Hoek refused to fire an answering signal; the Galleon, he said, might be a hundred miles away, and there was no point in wasting gunpowder.

That evening one far-sighted man insisted he saw a column of smoke to the southeast, which he took to be an infallible sign of land. Van Hoek said it was probably a waterspout. Still, several men loitered at that quarter of the ship, looking at it while the sun went down. Sunsets at this latitude, in November, were long and gradual, so they had plenty of time to look at this apparition, whatever it was, as the horizontal red light of dusk reflected from it.

Eventually the sun went down, of course, though some clouds high in the eastern sky continued to reflect back a faint glow for a while afterwards.

But there was one spot that refused to stop glowing, as if a spark of sun had flown off and gotten lodged there. It lay over the horizon, along the same bearing as the column of smoke or waterspout seen earlier. Van Hoek now revised his explanation: it was most likely an uncharted volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. As such it might be naught more than a hot rock. On the other hand it might have streams of fresh water, and birds that could be shot and eaten. Every mouth on the ship was, in an instant, flooded with saliva. So he ordered a change in course, and had more canvas raised, since tomorrow weather might close in and make it difficult to see the volcano and easy to run aground on it.

At first he estimated the distance to the volcano at a hundred miles or more. But the light (which at first they'd seen only by its reflection on a cloud layer above) popped up over the horizon almost immediately, and van Hoek halved the estimate. Then, when flickerings in that light became clearly visible, he halved it again. Finally he declared that this was no volcano but something entirely different, and then everyone understood that, whatever it was, they were no more than a few miles away from it. Van Hoek ordered a prudent reduction in speed. Every man was abovedecks now, bumping into things because dazzled by the light.

They were close enough to see that it was an enormous fire that had by some miracle been kindled on the very surface of the ocean. Crackles and roars came out of it, and it billowed and stretched easily, sometimes drawing itself up and surging hundreds of yards straight up into the air, other times growing squat and spreading out over the hissing surface of the calm sea. At times black shapes became visible in its heart: suggestions of massive ribs, and a broken mast clothed in fire. Sparks of green, red, and blue flame appeared here and there as exotic Oriental pigments and minerals were reached by the flames.

At some point they could no longer deny that they were hearing screams. "Socorro! Socorro!" The Spanish word for help had a sorrowful rather than an urgent sound. There was sentiment for going in closer, but "We wait for the magazine" was all van Hoek would say. Jack saw a red-hot cannon finally break through the charcoal beams that were supporting it. It dropped clumsily into the bilge and ejaculated a vast cloud of steam that blurred and dimmed the fire-light. One man with a very loud voice was crying "Socorro! Socorro!" But then he changed over into some Latin prayer.

He was halfway through it when all of the gunpowder on the Manila Galleon exploded at once. Flaming planks streaked away in every direction, blazing with the white heat of a forge as air shrieked over them, rapidly burning away to black cinders that plopped and sizzled in the water all around. Some landed on the ship and burnt little holes through her sails or started small fires on her deck, but van Hoek had long since ordered men to stand by with buckets, and so all flames were smartly doused.