others they curl over,
leaving a milk-white foam, and their slopes are marbled with a beautiful
spumy tracery. Very wonderful are these mottled waves: with a following
sea, at one moment it seems impossible that the great mountain which is
overtaking the ship will not overwhelm her, at another it appears
inevitable that the ship will fall into the space over which she seems to
be suspended and crash into the gulf which lies below.

But the seas are so long that they are neither dangerous nor
uncomfortable--though the Terra Nova rolled to an extraordinary extent,
quite constantly over 50 deg. each way, and sometimes 55 deg..

The cooks, however, had a bad time trying to cook for some fifty hands in
the little galley on the open deck. Poor Archer's efforts to make bread
sometimes ended in the scuppers, and the occasional jangle of the ship's
bell gave rise to the saying that "a moderate roll rings the bell, and a
big roll brings out the cook."

Noon on Sunday, September 18, found us in latitude 39 deg. 20' S. and
longitude 66 deg. 9' E., after a very good run, for the Terra Nova, of 200
miles in the last twenty-four hours. This made us about two days' run
from St. Paul, an uninhabited island formed by the remains of an old
volcano, the crater of which, surrounded as it were by a horse-shoe of
land, forms an almost landlocked harbour. It was hoped to make a landing
here for scientific work, but it is a difficult harbour to make. We ran
another two hundred miles on Monday, and on Tuesday all preparations were
made for the landing, with suitable equipment, and we were not a little
excited at the opportunity.

At 4.30 A.M. the next morning all hands were turned out to take in sail
preparatory to rounding St. Paul which was just visible. The weather was
squally, but not bad. By 5 A.M., however, it was blowing a moderate gale,
and by the time we had taken in all sail we had to give up hopes of a
landing. We were thoroughly sick of sails by the time we finally reefed
the foresail and ran before the wind under this and lower topsails.

We passed quite close to the island and could see into the crater, and
the cliffs beyond which rose from it, covered with greenish grass. There
were no trees, and of birds we only saw those which frequent these seas.
We had hoped to find penguins and albatross nesting on the island at this
time of the year, and this failure to land was most disappointing. The
island is 860 feet high, and, for