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MAKE STATEN LAND

the 'group, but not in sight of land, with a noble wind, at the rate of ten and twelve miles the hour. Great numbers of albatross, with flocks of haglets, and a beautiful ice-pigeon, probably from New Shetland, which lighted on our capstan hungry and exhausted, proclaimed an approach to the Cape; and on the morning of the 15th we made Staten Land, forty miles distant.

The time of day and manner in which the island came in sight, the weather and temperature, the doubling of Cape St. John and coasting of the southern shore, and the bearings and outline of the principal points, afterwards, were all so much the same as when on board the Thames, in 1823, that every thought was closely associated with the first sight of this distant and inhospitable region; and it seemed but a day since, hanging on my arm in the wintry garb of cap and mantle, you walked the deck with me, gazing with animation and pleasure on the novel and desolate scene.

The next evening we were in the longitude of Cape Horn, with the prospect of a speedy passage round, till a heavy western gale met us, and drove us entirely from our course. For a week afterwards the wind continued to blow fiercely, and at times with a violence equal to any thing I ever before witnessed. The Guerriere, however, "behaved well," as the sailors say; though the little canvass she could bear was reduced to a seive, and she often seemed on her beam ends. One night the wind blew a hurricane, and the labor of the ship in a tremendous sea was

such that the commodore, as well as the captain and first lieutenant, was up till morning.

During the whole period, the ocean presented a succession of varied and sublime scenes, heightened by the appearance of the frigate struggling in májesty amid the tumultuous conflict of billow raging against billow on every side. Even when her upper spars are sent down, which is generally the case in heavy weather, such a mass of rigging is still presented to the wind, that the rushing of the "impetuous storm," as it sweeps around and over us, sounds like the roaring of a tempest in the mountain forests, and would fill the mind unaccustomed to it with apprehension and horror; when familiar however, as to me, it only induces a musing mood, leading to thoughts commensurate with the state of the elements abroad.

A more sublime spectacle is seldom witnessed than that presented by a stately ship in a heavy gale at sea, or one more increasingly impressive the oftener it is seen and the longer gazed on. A finely modeled and perfectly rigged vessel is, under any circumstances, a chef d'œuvre of the art of man; but when seen thus to brave the tempest and the whirlwind, and to ride gracefully and triumphantly through all the contortions of the storm, there is presented in it an evidence of the power of mind in devising the means and perfecting the arrangements for a dominion over the winds and waves themselves, scarcely to be found in any other work of his hands.

For the last three days we have had a fair wind, with fine weather and moderate temperature; and in the longitude 81°, we consider ourselves entirely

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DOUBLE CAPE HORN AND

past the Cape and within a fortnight's sail of Valparaiso. It is but ten days since we made Staten Land, and we feel ourselves fortunate in having gained an entrance into the Pacific in that period.

Weddell, after the observation of several years in this region, considers the month intervening between the 15th of May and the middle of June as one of the best periods in the year for accomplishing this passage, and our experience on this occasion corroborates the belief. We experienced some hail and snow, but less falling weather than in the Thames in midsummer, and the temperature has not been much colder. The mercury, on one occasion only, fell as low as 299. The greater shortness of the day. makes the most important difference; but with the benefit of a full moon, we have felt no particular inconvenience from nights of sixteen hours duration.

There is reason for much thankfulness that we have thus escaped every extreme of danger and a long delay in this region; and that we have been favored with such weather that, except during the continuance of the gale, we were permitted, at the very remotest point to which we were driven, to continue on the open deck our evening worship; and, at the very extremity of the globe, daily to offer our praises and our prayers to Him who is "the confidence alike of all the ends of the earth and of them that are afar off upon the sea."

GAIN SIGHT OF THE ANDES.

127

LETTER III.

DESCRIPTION OF VALPARAISO.

U. S. ship Guerriere, off Valparaiso,
June 10, 1829.

"SAIL ho!" from aloft, on the morning of the 5th inst., broke the monotony of the preceding fortnight. A vessel was on our lee-bow; and we bore away for her. It proved to be the brig Fortune from Huacho, bound to Boston; and we gladly boarded her, with letters to communicate to our friends, the safe arrival of the Guerriere on this side the continent.

The still more animating and welcome sound of "land ahead!" echoed round our decks yesterday. The faintest outline of a mountainous coast could, at first, scarcely be traced in the east; but long before night, we had noble views of the Cordilleras, standing like a wall of eternal snow against a sombre sky. They were still sixty or seventy miles distant; but the gleaming of a declining sun, against their icy summits, presented them in clear and strongly defined outlines to the eager and admiring gaze of our ship's company.

This morning, while it was scarce yet light, Mr. Babbitt, our first lieutenant, entered my state-room to hasten me on deck for a sunrise view of the coast. We were yet twenty miles or more from land; and the cold gray of the dawn was just giving place over it to the warmer tints of the rising day. At first the

whole seemed only a dark, gigantic wall rising from the sea; but irregular lines of light and shade soon. became perceptible, disclosing the formation of the country intervening between the coast and the Andes; and throwing these last far in the distance inland.

As the day advanced, the landscape grew more and more distinct; and the coloring of the whole increased in richness, till just as the sun burst from behind the mountains, the scene became one of the finest I have witnessed: exhibiting first along the water's edge, a brown, sterile and iron-bound coast, with a headland here and there of wild, fantastic rock; then the nearer hills tinged with green, and backed by loftier ranges in purple and blue, rising one above another in every variety of form till piled against the sides of the Andes themselves-whose ragged and inaccessible peaks, glittering with perpetual ice and snow towered over the whole, in such magnitude of dimension and such loftiness of height, as irresistibly to fill the mind with emotions of sublimity and admiration.

Above these,

"The azure arch'd sky

Look'd pure as the Spirit that made it;"

while broad rays of gold from the sun behind shot upward to the very zenith. With his appearance, however, the charm was dissolved-a blurring haze overspread the whole from the Andes to the shore; and every rich hue was in a moment dashed with a general neutral tint.