"
Back to the spot sailed the galleon;
Where, for a twelve-month, off and on
The hundred and eightieth degree,
She rose and fell on a tropic sea:
But lo! when it came to the ninth of May,
All of a sudden becalmed she lay
One degree from that fatal spot,
Without the power to move a knot;
And of course the moment she lost her way,
Gone was her chance to save that day.
To cut a lengthening story short,
She never saved it. Made the sport
Of evil spirits and baffling wind,
She was always before or just behind,
One day too soon, or one day too late,
And the sun, meanwhile, would never wait:
She had two eighths, as she idly lay,
Two tenths, but never a _ninth_ of May;
And there she rides through two hundred years
Of dreary penance and anxious fears:
Yet through the grace of the saint she served,
Captain and crew are still preserved.
By a computation that still holds good,
Made by the Holy Brotherhood,
The "San Gregorio" will cross that line
In nineteen hundred and thirty-nine:
Just three hundred years to a day
From the time she lost the ninth of May.
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