He replied, by shewing us several little shell-fish adhering to the under side of a bit of weed. “These,” said he, “must have been deposited there before it was torn from its native rocks by the current; in the course of their long voyage they grow; and their increased size and weight gradually sink the weed. My attention was first turned to this curious circumstance from having observed some of the weed lying edgewise in the water; I had it taken up, and found some heavy limpets attached to the lower edge.”
Mrs. P—— acknowledged this was quite a new fact to her.
20th.—The captain amused us to-day by shewing a very simple method of ascertaining the saltness of the sea, which any person can try. He dried a towel in the sun, weighed it carefully, and I noted its weight. It was then dipped in sea-water, and being wrung sufficiently to prevent it from dripping, it was again weighed, the increase of weight being that of the water imbibed by the cloth. It was now thoroughly dried, and once more weighed, and the excess of this weight, above the original weight of the cloth, shows the quantity of the salt retained by it; then, by comparing the weight of this salt with that of the sea-water imbibed by the cloth, we found what proportion of salt was contained in the water.
22d.—This morning a little land bird flew on board; I begged to have it, and I keep it in the cabin, and feed it. I asked how they knew it was from the land, and a sailor answered, “No sea birds, Miss, except boobies[1], ever rest upon the ships they follow; this poor fellow has been blown off shore by some long north-easter.”
Our captain was laughing to-day at the mistakes that authors, who have never been at sea, make in some of their fine poetical descriptions. He mentioned the albatross, as an instance, which some one has described as rising off the deck. He says it never alights on the deck, and if it were there, it could not rise again. It finds great difficulty in rising even from the sea, and scrambles along the waves to a great distance before it can fairly use its wings. They have five joints to spread out, and appear to have no motion except at the moment the bird first raises itself into the air; when, at the same time, it makes several strokes against the water with its webbed feet. This impulse once given it seems to have no longer occasion to flap its wings; it holds them widely expanded while it glides along, balancing its body from right to left, and sweeping majestically over the surface of the sea.
24th.—We have passed two of the Azores or Western islands,—Flores looked very green; but the other, Corvo, seems little better than a lofty, naked rock.
25th.—We have had a very hot south-easterly wind this morning, which the captain says comes from Africa. He showed us that the sails and ropes were tinged with the reddish sand that these winds generally carry with them. It was quite impalpable to the touch; and he was for a long time trying to obtain some of it, by washing and roasting, for his microscope.
26th.—I am growing a little tired, dear Mamma, of this long voyage, though Mrs. P—— finds continual objects of amusement for me. Sometimes, when there is a heavy swell of the sea, and that the wind blows freshly, we divert ourselves watching the waves: it is curious to see the head of a large wave, just as it rises and meets the wind, dashed off, and changed into foam; and showing, when we can place ourselves between it and the sun, innumerable little rainbows.
I happened to say at dinner that I wondered how this constantly moving ocean should ever become frozen into one field of ice; but the captain told me that the deep ocean never freezes permanently. Any ice that may have been formed on it in winter is broken up by gales of wind, and is drifted about till it becomes fixed to the shores.
The great icebergs that are sometimes seen floating on the sea are formed by the accumulation of ages on high precipitous shores, and are afterwards broken off by their increasing weight.