eight knots,
and with spare power enough to gyrate continually in their wayward
flight. What instinct taught them that there was food there for them?
and, if my observation agree with that of others, why have they
disappeared from steamers? Is it the greater pace that wearies, or the
commotion of the screw that daunts them?

Our second Thursday gale, May 16th, exceeded the first in fury and
duration. Beginning at daybreak, it lasted till after sundown, twelve
hours in all; and during it the _Iroquois_ took on board the only
solid sea that crossed her rail during my more than two years' service
in her. We sprung also our main mast-head, which made us feel
flatteringly like the ancient mariners, who, as we had read, were
always "springing" (breaking) some spar or other. Ancient mariners and
albatrosses are naturally mutually suggestive. Except for the greater
violence, the conditions were much the same as a week before; with the
exception, however, that the sun shone brightly most of the time from
a cloudless sky, between which and us there interposed a milky haze,
the vapor of the spoon-drift. During the height of the storm the
pressure of the wind in great degree kept down the sea, which did not
rise threateningly till towards the end. For the rest, our voyage of
thirty-three hundred miles, while it afforded us many samples of
weather, presented as a chief characteristic perpetual westerly gales,
with gloomy skies and long, high following swell. Although the wind
was such that close to it we should have been reduced to storm-sails,
the _Iroquois_ scudded easily before it, carrying considerable canvas.
"Before it" must not be understood to mean ahead of the waves. These,
as they raced along continually, swept by the ship, which usually
lifted cleverly abaft as they came up; though at rare intervals a tiny
bit of a crest would creep along over the poop and fall on the
quarter-deck below--nothing to hurt. The onward movement of the
billows, missing thus the stern, culminated generally about half-way
forward, abreast the main-mast; and if the ship, in her continual
steady but easy roll, happened just then to incline to one side, she
would scoop in a few dozen buckets of water, enough to keep the decks
always sloppy, as it swashed from side to side.

From Rio to the Cape took us thirty-two days. This bears out the
remark I find in an old letter that the _Iroquois_ was very slow; but
it attests also a series of vicissitudes