land. Then you feel, with all
ignorant races, as if the ship were a god, thus to find its way over
that trackless waste, or as if this must be some great and unprecedented
success, and in no way the expected or usual result of such enterprises.
A sea-captain of twenty-five years' experience told me that this
sensation never wore off, and that he still felt as fresh a sense of
something extraordinary, on making land, as upon his first voyage. To
discover for one's self that there is really another side to the ocean,
--that is the astonishing thing. And when it happens, as in our case,
that the haven thus gained is not merely a part of a great continent
which the stupidest ship could not miss, if it only sailed far enough,
but is actually a small volcanic island, a mere dot among those wild
waves, a thing which one might easily have passed in the night,
unsuspecting, and which yet was not so passed,--it really seems like the
maddest piece of good-luck, as if one should go to sea in a bowl, hoping
somewhere or other to land on the edge of a tea-cup.

As next day we stumbled on deck in the foggy dawn, the dim island five
miles off seemed only dawning too, a shapeless thing, half-formed out of
chaos, as if the leagues of gray ocean had grown weary of their eternal
loneliness, and bungled into something like land at last. The phrase
"_making_ land" at once became the simple and necessary expression; we
had come upon the very process itself. Nearer still, the cliffs five
hundred feet in height, and the bare conical hills of the interior,
divided everywhere by cane-hedges into a regular checker-work of
cultivation, prolonged the mystery; and the glimpses of white villages
scarcely seemed to break the spell. Point after point we passed,--great
shoulders of volcanic mountain thrust out to meet the sea, with steep
green ravines furrowed in between them; and when at last we rounded the
Espalamarca, and the white walls and the Moorish towers of Horta stood
revealed before us, and a stray sunbeam pierced the clouds on the great
mountain Pico across the bay, and the Spanish steamship in the harbor
flung out her gorgeous ensign of gold and blood--then, indeed, we felt
that all the glowing cup of the tropics was proffered to our lips, and
the dream of our voyage stood fulfilled.

Not one of our immediate party, most happily, had ever been beyond
Boston Harbor before, and so we all plunged without fear or apology into
the delicious sens