Surinam, who had
fifty things to tell of his own special business--of the woods, the
drugs, the barks, the vegetable oils, which he was going back to
procure--a whole new world of yet unknown wealth and use. Most
cheering, too, and somewhat unexpected, were the facts we heard of
the improving state of our West India Colonies, in which the tide of
fortune seems to have turned at last, and the gallant race of
planters and merchants, in spite of obstacle on obstacle, some of
them unjust and undeserved, are winning their way back (in their own
opinion) to a prosperity more sound and lasting than that which
collapsed so suddenly at the end of the great French war. All spoke
of the emancipation of the slaves in Cuba (an event certain to come
to pass ere long) as the only condition which they required to put
them on an equal footing with any producers whatsoever in the New
World.

However pleasant, though, the conversation might be, the smallest
change in external circumstances, the least break in the perpetual--

'Quocumque adspicias, nil est nisi pontus et aer,'

even a passing bird, if one would pass, which none would do save
once or twice a stately tropic-bird, wheeling round aloft like an
eagle, was hailed as an event in the day; and, on the 9th of
December, the appearance of the first fragments of gulf-weed caused
quite a little excitement, and set an enthusiastic pair of
naturalists--a midland hunting squire, and a travelled scientific
doctor who had been twelve years in the Eastern Archipelago--fishing
eagerly over the bows, with an extemporised grapple of wire, for
gulf-weed, a specimen of which they did not catch. However, more
and more still would come in a day or two, perhaps whole acres, even
whole leagues, and then (so we hoped, but hoped in vain) we should
have our feast of zoophytes, crustacea, and what not.

Meanwhile, it must be remembered that this gulf-weed has not, as
some of the uninitiated fancy from its name, anything to do with the
Gulf Stream, along the southern edge of which we were steaming.
Thrust away to the south by that great ocean-river, it lies in a
vast eddy, or central pool of the Atlantic, between the Gulf Stream
and the equatorial current, unmoved save by surface-drifts of wind,
as floating weeds collect and range slowly round and round in the
still corners of a tumbling-bay or salmon pool. One glance at a bit
of the weed, as it floats past,