Both north and south of the Equator, his calculations proved so accurate that almost all the Globe Star’s landfalls, on a route from Dakar via Sydney round to Bermuda, were within 15 miles of the target, and close to the dates he’d set. Yet for much of the voyage he could not see the night sky at all. Crossing the Pacific, they had five sights of the stars in 5,000 miles. To estimate latitude and direction he had to be fiercely observant in daylight, too.

But he thought they had because the sea had gone from a dark transparent green to a lighter green and then turned dark again—the colour, an old mariner had told him, of the Atlantic. He guessed they had, too, from the sudden icy breath of a north wind coming off the snow-covered Andes. The wind was always a useful indicator. Leaving Cape May, he had set course south-east for Senegal by keeping the freezing north-westerly at the midpoint of the back of his neck. After days in the doldrums, floating with no direction, the sudden nail-scraping squeak of a hatch told him that a dry wind was blowing up from Antarctica.

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