Our bottle moved along with the slow but majestic flow of one of those mighty currents which are begotten among the hot isles of the Pacific, where the corallines love to build their tiny dwellings and rear their reefs and groves.
In process of time it left the warm regions of the sun, and entered those stormy seas which hold perpetual war around Cape Horn. It passed the straits where Magellan spread his adventurous sails in days of old, and doubled the cape which Byron, Bougainville, and Cook had doubled long before it.
Ah! well would it be for man if the bottle had never doubled anything but that cape! And alas for man when his sight is doubled, and his crimes and woes are doubled, and his life is halved instead of doubled, by—“the bottle!”
Off Cape Horn our adventurous little craft met with the rough usage from winds and waves that marked the passage of its predecessors. Stormy petrels hovered over it and pecked its neck and cork. Albatrosses stooped inquiringly and flapped their gigantic wings above it. South Sea seals came up from Ocean’s caves, and rubbed their furred sides against it. Sea-lions poked it with their grizzly snouts; and penguins sat bolt upright in rows on the sterile islands near the cape, and gazed at it in wonder.
Onward it moved with the north-western drift, and sighted on its left, (on its port bow, to speak nautically), the land of Patagonia, where the early discoverers reported the men to be from six to ten feet high, and the ladies six feet; the latter being addicted to staining their eyelids black, and the former to painting a red circle round their left eyes. These early discoverers failed, however, to tell us why the right eyes of the men were neglected; so we are forced to the conclusion that they were left thus untouched in order that they might wink facetiously with the more freedom. Modern travellers, it would seem, contradict, (as they usually do), many of the statements of ancient voyagers; and there is now reason to believe that the Patagonians are not much more outrageous in any respect than ordinary savages elsewhere.
Not long after doubling the Cape, the bottle sailed slowly past the Falkland Islands, whose rugged cliffs and sterile aspect seemed in accordance with their character of penal settlement. Sea-lions, penguins, and seals were more numerous than ever here, as if they were the guardians of the place, ready to devour all hapless criminals who should recklessly attempt to swim away from “durance vile.”
Indeed, it was owing to the curiosity of a sea-lion that at this point in its long voyage the bottle was saved from destruction. A storm had recently swept the southern seas, and the bottle, making bad weather of it in passing the Falklands, was unexpectedly driven on a lee-shore in attempting to double a promontory. Whether promontories are more capable of resisting the bottle than human beings, I know not; but certain it is that the promontory arrested its progress. It began to clink along the foot of the cliffs at the outermost point with alarming violence; and there can be no reasonable doubt that it would have become a miserable wreck there, if it had not chanced to clink right under the nose of a sea-lion which was basking in the sunshine, and sound asleep on a flat rock.
Opening its eyes and ears at the unwonted sound, the lion gazed inquiringly at the bottle, and raised its shaggy front the better to inspect it. Apparently the sight stimulated its curiosity, for, with a roar and a gush of ardent spirit, it plunged into the sea and drove the bottle far down into the deep.
Finding, apparently, that nothing came of this terrific onslaught, the lion did not reappear. It sneaked away, no doubt, into some coral cave. But the force of the push sent the bottle a few yards out to sea, and so it doubled the promontory and continued its voyage.
Shortly after this, however, a check was put to its progress which threatened to be permanent.