th heaving breast and troubled eye watching the course of the
cetacean. I looked and looked till I was nearly blind, whilst Conseil
kept repeating in a calm voice:

"If, sir, you would not squint so much, you would see better!"

But vain excitement! The Abraham Lincoln checked its speed and made
for the animal signalled, a simple whale, or common cachalot, which
soon disappeared amidst a storm of abuse.

But the weather was good. The voyage was being accomplished under the
most favourable auspices. It was then the bad season in Australia, the
July of that zone corresponding to our January in Europe, but the sea
was beautiful and easily scanned round a vast circumference.

The 20th of July, the tropic of Capricorn was cut by 105d of longitude,
and the 27th of the same month we crossed the Equator on the 110th
meridian. This passed, the frigate took a more decided westerly
direction, and scoured the central waters of the Pacific. Commander
Farragut thought, and with reason, that it was better to remain in deep
water, and keep clear of continents or islands, which the beast itself
seemed to shun (perhaps because there was not enough water for him!
suggested the greater part of the crew). The frigate passed at some
distance from the Marquesas and the Sandwich Islands, crossed the
tropic of Cancer, and made for the China Seas. We were on the theatre
of the last diversions of the monster: and, to say truth, we no longer
LIVED on board. The entire ship's crew were undergoing a nervous
excitement, of which I can give no idea: they could not eat, they
could not sleep--twenty times a day, a misconception or an optical
illusion of some sailor seated on the taffrail, would cause dreadful
perspirations, and these emotions, twenty times repeated, kept us in a
state of excitement so violent that a reaction was unavoidable.

And truly, reaction soon showed itself. For three months, during which
a day seemed an age, the Abraham Lincoln furrowed all the waters of the
Northern Pacific, running at whales, making sharp deviations from her
course, veering suddenly from one tack to another, stopping suddenly,
putting on steam, and backing ever and anon at the risk of deranging
her machinery, and not one point of the Japanese or American coast was
left unexplored.

The warmest partisans of the enterprise now became its most ardent
detractors. Reaction mounted from the crew to the captain himself, and
certainly, had it not bee