The latter are pieces of grooved wood, for throwing water over the planks or outer sheathing of a ship, to prevent them from being rent by the heat of the sun in warm climates.
For some weeks Hartly and I were totally unable to make ourselves of any use, so great was the lassitude which succeeded our recent sufferings, and rapid transition from starvation and misery to comfortable quarters, and from the Regions of Ice to those of the burning sun; for after passing St. Jago, the most southerly of the Cape de Verd Isles, we rapidly approached the line; and then Captain Baylis, his wife, Hartly, and others, prepared letters for home, to be left at the Isle of Ascension, or given to the first ship that passed us for England.
Day after day I reclined listlessly under the awning, watching the shining sea, on which many an argonauta now was floating; and, in a warm latitude, singularly beautiful are those little "Portuguese men-of-war," as our sailors term them, when whole fleets of them may be seen sailing past, with their purple sails up and rowing swiftly, with all their tentacula or feelers out.
But, on being approached by anything, in go the tentacula, and down sinks the miniature sail, as the fish concentrates itself in its shell, and both vanish together, like a fairy in the sea.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE SAILOR'S POST-OFFICE.
We crossed the line on the last day of June. I need not rehearse the description of a hackneyed ceremony known to all—how curtains were rigged amidships—how Father Neptune with his hempen beard came on board, seated on a gun-carriage, and how roughly all who had not crossed the line before were tarred, scraped, shaved, and soused by his whimsically attired barbers, courtiers, and Tritons, to the great delight of the older salts—a ceremony which I only escaped in consequence of my recent sufferings.
Two days after, we passed St. Matthew, a little desert isle on which the Portuguese formed a settlement so early as 1516, and which lies "amid the melancholy main," at a vast distance from the African coast. It is the abode of sea-birds alone.
Then we completed our bag of letters, which were all duly gummed up—wax will not do in the tropics—for delivery at Ascension, which, after three hundred miles' further run, we sighted on the evening of the 9th July, for we had a fine wind, and the Princess carried her studdingsails night and day.
I was not without hope that we might find some homeward-bound vessel at Ascension, on board of which we might be transferred, as I was most anxious to return home to tranquillize the minds of my own family, whom I knew must long since have numbered me with the dead; but this hope was dissipated when we came abreast of the roadstead, which was empty, and let go our anchor about midnight, in fourteen fathom water, on a red sandy bottom.