t blush
of the dawn, during the morning watch, and I could barely distinguish
the fleet far to leeward, with their royals just showing above the
horizon. On taking leave of our convoy, we were reminded that there is
always something about the last, the very last look of any object,
which brings with it a feeling of melancholy. On this occasion,
however, we had nothing more serious to reproach ourselves with than
sundry impatient execrations with which we had honoured some of our
slow-moving, heavy-sterned friends, when we were compelled to shorten
sail in a fair wind, in order to keep them company. A smart frigate
making a voyage with a dull-sailing convoy reminds one of the child's
story of the provoking journey made by the hare with a drove of oxen.

Our merry attendants, the flying-fish, and others which swarmed about
us in the torrid zone, refused to see us across the tropic, and the
only aquatics we fell in with afterwards were clumsy whales and
grampuses, and occasionally a shoal of white porpoises. Of birds there
were plenty, especially albatrosses. The captain, being a good shot
with a ball, brought down one of these, which measured seven feet
between the tips of the wings. I have several times seen them twelve
feet; and I heard a well-authenticated account of one measuring
sixteen feet from tip to tip. On the 22nd of June we came in sight of
the high land on the northern part of the peninsula of the Cape of
Good Hope, the far-famed Table Mountain, which looked its character
very well, and really did not disappoint us, though, in general, its
height, like that of most high lands, is most outrageously exaggerated
in pictures. The wind failed us during the day, and left us rolling
about till the evening, when the breeze came too late to be of much
use. Next day we rounded the pitch of the Cape, but it blew so strong
from the northward, right out of False Bay, accompanied by rain and a
high sea, that we found it no easy job to hold our own, much less to
gain the anchorage. But on the 24th of June, the day after, the wind
moderated and became fair, the weather cleared up, and we sailed
almost into Simon's Bay, a snug little nook at the north-western angle
of False Bay. It then fell calm, but the boats of the men-of-war at
anchor, his Majesty's ships Lion, Nisus, and Galatea, soon towed us
into our berth. During the winter of that hemisphere, which
corresponds to our northern summer, the only safe quarters for ships