The False North

Every map he made put the Selkirk Passage nine miles north of where it is.

Nine miles is nothing on paper and it is everything in fog. Four ships in twenty years, and each time the inquiry found the master at fault, and each time my father sat in the gallery in his good coat and said nothing at all.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell this as though I understood it at the time. I did not. I was eleven, and I was proud of him.