There Is Always At This
Time Of Year A Strong Westerly Set Here.
The wind was the commencement
of the S.E. trades, and was welcomed by all with the greatest pleasure.
In two days more we reached the line.
We crossed the line far too much to the west, in longitude 31 degrees 6
minutes, after a very long passage of nearly seven weeks, such as our
captain says he never remembers to have made; fine winds, however, now
began to favour us, and in another week we got out of the tropics,
having had the sun vertically overhead, so as to have no shadow, on the
preceding day. Strange to say, the weather was never at all
oppressively hot after latitude 2 degrees north, or thereabouts. A fine
wind, or indeed a light wind, at sea removes all unpleasant heat even of
the hottest and most perpendicular sun. The only time that we suffered
any inconvenience at all from heat was during the belt of calms; when
the sun was vertically over our heads it felt no hotter than on an
ordinary summer day. Immediately, however, upon leaving the tropics the
cold increased sensibly, and in latitude 27 degrees 8 minutes I find
that I was not warm once all day. Since then we have none of us ever
been warm, save when taking exercise or in bed; when the thermometer was
up at 50 degrees we thought it very high and called it warm. The reason
of the much greater cold of the southern than of the northern hemisphere
is that the former contains so much less land. I have not seen the
thermometer below 42 degrees in my cabin, but am sure that outside it
has often been very much lower. We almost all got chilblains, and
wondered much what the winter of this hemisphere must be like if this
was its summer: I believe, however, that as soon as we get off the
coast of Australia, which I hope we may do in a couple of days, we shall
feel a very sensible rise in the thermometer at once. Had we known what
was coming, we should have prepared better against it, but we were most
of us under the impression that it would be warm summer weather all the
way. No doubt we felt it more than we should otherwise on account of
our having so lately crossed the line.
The great feature of the southern seas is the multitude of birds which
inhabit it. Huge albatrosses, molimorks (a smaller albatross), Cape
hens, Cape pigeons, parsons, boobies, whale birds, mutton birds, and
many more, wheel continually about the ship's stern, sometimes in
dozens, sometimes in scores, always in considerable numbers. If a
person takes two pieces of pork and ties them together, leaving perhaps
a yard of string between the two pieces, and then throws them into the
sea, one albatross will catch hold of one end, and another of the other,
each bolts his own end and then tugs and fights with his rival till one
or other has to disgorge his prize; we have not, however, succeeded in
catching any, neither have we tried the above experiment ourselves.
Albatrosses are not white; they are grey, or brown with a white streak
down the back, and spreading a little into the wings. The under part of
the bird is a bluish-white. They remain without moving the wing a
longer time than any bird that I have ever seen, but some suppose that
each individual feather is vibrated rapidly, though in very small space,
without any motion being imparted to the main pinions of the wing. 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.
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