On the morning of Sunday the thirtieth of September four rabo de juncos came to the ship; and from so many of them coming together it was thought the land could not be far distant, especially as four alcatrazes followed soon afterwards. Great quantities of weeds were seen in a line stretching from W.N.W. to E.N.E. and a great number of the fishes which are called Emperadores, which have a very hard skin and are not fit to eat. Though the admiral paid every attention to these indications, he never neglected those in the heavens, and carefully observed the course of the stars. He was now greatly surprised to notice at this time that the _Charles wain_ or Ursa Major constellation appeared at night in the west, and was N.E. in the morning: He thence concluded that their whole nights course was only nine hours, or so many parts in twenty-four of a great circle; and this he observed to be the case regularly every night. It was likewise noticed that the compass varied a whole point to the N.W. at night-fall, and came due north every morning at day-break. As this unheard-of circumstance confounded and perplexed the pilots, who apprehended danger in these strange regions and at such unusual distance from home, the admiral endeavoured to calm their fears by assigning a cause for this wonderful phenomenon: He alleged that it was occasioned by the polar star making a circuit round the pole, by which they were not a little satisfied. Soon after sunrise on Monday the first of October, an alcatraz came to the ship, and two more about ten in the morning, and long streams of weeds floated from east to west. That morning the pilot of the admirals ship said that they were now 578 leagues west from the island of Ferro. In his public account the admiral said they were 584 leagues to the west; but in his private journal he made the real distance 707 leagues, or 129 more than was reckoned by the pilot. The other two ships differed much in their computation from each other and from the admirals pilot. The pilot of Nina in the afternoon of the Wednesday following said they had only sailed 540 leagues, and the pilot of the Pinta reckoned 634. Thus they were all much short of the truth; but the admiral winked at the gross mistake, that the men, not thinking themselves so far from home, might be the less dejected.