er place, little was thought or said about the matter.
We embarked on the P. and O. steamship, Brindisi, for Singapore, by the
way of the China Sea and the Gulf of Siam. The northeast monsoon favored
us, as we rushed like a race-horse over the turbulent sea, with a
following gale,--the threatening waves appearing as if they would
certainly engulf us if they could catch up with the stern of the ship.
The Philippine Islands were given a wide berth, as we steered southward
towards the equator. The cholera was raging among the group; and in
illustration of the fact that misfortunes never come as single spies,
but in battalions, Manilla, the capital, had just been nearly destroyed
by a typhoon. Leaving Borneo on our port bow as we neared the equatorial
line, the ship was steered due west for the mouth of the Straits lying
between the Malay Peninsula and the Island of Sumatra.

While running off the Gulf of Siam we got our first view of a veritable
water-spout. It was from four to five miles off our starboard bow, but
quite as near as we desired it to be. It seems that both atmospheric and
aquatic currents meet here: from the China Sea northward, from the
Malacca Straits southward, and from the Pacific Ocean eastward, mingling
at the entrance of the Gulf of Siam, causing at times a confusion of the
elements. At least this was the captain's theory, and it seems that he
had more than once met with water-spouts at this point. They are
nothing more or less than a miniature cyclone, an eddying of the wind
rotating with such velocity as to suck up a column of water from the sea
to a height of one or two hundred feet. This column of water appears to
be largest at the top and bottom and visibly contracted at the middle.
If it were to fall foul of a ship and break, it would wreck and submerge
her as surely as though she were run down by an iceberg. Modern science
shows that all storms are cyclonic, that is, are circular eddies of wind
of greater or less diameter.

No two geographers seem to agree as to what constitutes the Malay
Archipelago, but the five islands nearest to the Peninsula should
undoubtedly be thus classified; namely, Singapore, Penang, Borneo,
Sumatra, and Java,--the latter containing more volcanoes, active and
extinct, than any other known district of equal extent. If the reader
will glance at a map of the Eastern Hemisphere, it will be observed that
many islands dot the equatorial region between Asia and Australia. S