"It is all very well, old boy, but we weathered you fairly!"
As we approached the Cape de Verd, Estremera issued strict orders that no man was to sleep on deck at night, for fear of moon blindness—an ailment not uncommon in the tropics. An old voyager, Sir Richard Hawkins, relates that the moon's rays off the African coast have a singularly pernicious effect upon the human body, and that "he knew a person who, sleeping one night in his cabin on the coast of Guinea, with the moon shining upon him, had such a violent pain burning in his shoulder, that for above twenty hours he was like a madman, and was not freed from it at last without a great many applications and abundance of suffering;" though what this ailment was, would now greatly puzzle one to discover.
After a delightful run, on one of the last days of autumn, we sighted the Cape de Verd and the Isle of Goree.
Those rose on our starboard bow, rapidly and abruptly, for the ship was running before the wind at the rate of nine knots an hour, with all her studding-sails rigged out.
It was about dawn when land was first discovered from aloft, and by midday the Isle of Goree bore about three miles off on our starboard beam.
The wind now fell light, and, as the ship crept along, we had a good opportunity for observing the coast by our telescopes.
Fra Anselmo, who had once resided there as a missionary, drew my attention to the sea of floating weeds, called the sargasso, through which we were sailing,—weeds which are so brilliant and so green as to impart a peculiar hue to the water, and thereby gave the promontory its name,—the Cape de Verd.
Along the shore we could see groves of the orange, the lemon, the pomegranate, and the citron tree, with their ripe golden fruit studding the green foliage like golden balls.
On the almost inaccessible isle of Goree, Fra Anselmo showed to us the old castle of St. Michael, which was built by the Dutch in 1617, and stormed forty-six years after by the English, under Admiral Holmes. In 1664 it was retaken by Adrian de Ruyter, after a little band of sixty British soldiers, under a Scotsman, named Sir George Abercrombie, made a defence so protracted and so resolute, that they only surrendered after the walls were battered to ruin, and all their ammunition was expended.
It was not without deep interest that we viewed these scenes and heard those forgotten fragments of our past history, when so far from old England, and while sailing along a shore so wild and vast as Africa.