I Am
Informed That There Is A Strong Muscle Attached To Each Of The Large
Plumes In Their Wings.
It certainly is strange how so large a bird
should be able to travel so far and so fast without any motion of the
wing.
Albatrosses are often entirely brown, but farther south, and when
old, I am told, they become sometimes quite white. The stars of the
southern hemisphere are lauded by some: I cannot see that they surpass
or equal those of the northern. Some, of course, are the same. The
southern cross is a very great delusion. It isn't a cross. It is a
kite, a kite upside down, an irregular kite upside down, with only three
respectable stars and one very poor and very much out of place. Near
it, however, is a truly mysterious and interesting object called the
coal sack: it is a black patch in the sky distinctly darker than all
the rest of the heavens. No star shines through it. The proper name
for it is the black Magellan cloud.
We reached the Cape, passing about six degrees south of it, in twenty-
five days after crossing the line, a very fair passage; and since the
Cape we have done well until a week ago, when, after a series of very
fine runs, and during as fair a breeze as one would wish to see, we were
some of us astonished to see the captain giving orders to reef topsails.
The royals were stowed, so were the top-gallant-sails, topsails close
reefed, mainsail reefed, and just at 10.45 p.m., as I was going to bed,
I heard the captain give the order to take a reef in the foresail and
furl the mainsail; but before I was in bed a quarter of an hour
afterwards, a blast of wind came up like a wall, and all night it blew a
regular hurricane. The glass, which had dropped very fast all day, and
fallen lower than the captain had ever seen it in the southern
hemisphere, had given him warning what was coming, and he had prepared
for it. That night we ran away before the wind to the north, next day
we lay hove-to till evening, and two days afterwards the gale was
repeated, but with still greater violence. The captain was all ready
for it, and a ship, if she is a good sea-boat, may laugh at any winds or
any waves provided she be prepared. The danger is when a ship has got
all sail set and one of these bursts of wind is shot out at her; then
her masts go overboard in no time. Sailors generally estimate a gale of
wind by the amount of damage it does, if they don't lose a mast or get
their bulwarks washed away, or at any rate carry away a few sails, they
don't call it a gale, but a stiff breeze; if, however, they are caught
even by comparatively a very inferior squall, and lose something, they
call it a gale.
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