lowed up, and for the occasional coral heads which might 

 appear. 



It puzzled me how Ed expected to know when we 

 had reached the latitudes Captain Phips had indicated, 

 for once we had left the rock there was nothing to indi- 

 cate our position, I soon learned the answer, for Ed, hav- 

 ing assigned me to steer the boat while Dick Burrows 

 watched from the pulpit for any hazards ahead of us, sank 

 to his knees before the loran, his head covered with a dark 

 cloth to shut out the daylight, observing its intricate light- 

 ninglike patterns. Within these trappings, he was able 

 to pinpoint our exact latitude and longitude. 



By the middle of the afternoon we had voyaged north 

 to the edge of Matanilla shoal and then back to the reef 

 which Ed had picked as the location of the copper wreck. 

 Far to the south. Memory rock was dimly visible on the 

 horizon. Although the day was nearly gone by the time we 

 had our anchor down, and the sea, even behind the reef, 

 was choppy from a brisk northwest wind, we could not re- 

 sist a brief exploratory trip in the glass-bottomed boat. 



Jane, Barney, and I had hardly left Sea Diver before 

 we spotted on the bottom a large, coral-crusted anchor 

 and an attached section of chain. We relayed our dis- 

 covery to Ed on the deck of Sea Diver and then went on 

 our way, but without the excitement usually attendant 

 upon such a discovery, for we realized that the presence 

 of the chain marked it as a product of the past century. 

 Until that time only rope had been used for anchor cable. 

 A cruise along the outer edge of the reef for several miles 

 revealed nothing further, and, as the sea had become 

 rougher, we headed back to Sea Diver. 



When Ed and I arrived on deck the next morning, we 

 found that the rest of the party had already embarked 

 on a before-breakfast survey of the shoal. They returned 

 shortly with news of the discovery of two more anchors 



The Bahama Islands 111 



