_Centurion_, and by Captain Legg on board the _Severn_, which was another ship of our squadron. This digression I have been in some measure drawn into by the consideration of the fine weather we met with on the coast of Peru, even under the equinoctial itself, but the particularities of this weather I have not yet described: I shall now therefore add, that in this climate every circumstance concurred that could make the open air and the daylight desirable. For in other countries the scorching heat of the sun in summer renders the greater part of the day unapt either for labour or amusement; and the frequent rains are not less troublesome in the more temperate parts of the year. But in this happy climate the sun rarely appears. Not that the heavens have at any time a dark and gloomy look; for there is constantly a chearful grey sky, just sufficient to screen the sun, and to mitigate the violence of its perpendicular rays, without obscuring the air, or tinging the daylight with an unpleasant or melancholy hue. By this means all parts of the day are proper for labour or exercise abroad, nor is there wanting that refreshment and pleasing refrigeration of the air which is sometimes produced in other climates by rains; for here the same effect is brought about by the fresh breezes from the cooler regions to the southward. It is reasonable to suppose that this fortunate complexion of the heavens is principally owing to the neighbourhood of those vast hills called the Andes, which, running nearly parallel to the shore, and at a small distance from it, and extending themselves immensely higher than any other mountains upon the globe, form upon their sides and declivities a prodigious tract of country, where, according to the different approaches to the summit, all kinds of climates may at all seasons of the year be found. These mountains, by intercepting great part of the eastern winds which generally blow over the continent of South America, and by cooling that part of the air which forces its way over their tops, and by keeping besides a large portion of the atmosphere perpetually cool, from its contiguity to the snows with which they are covered--these hills, thus spreading the influence {174} of their frozen crests to the neighbouring coasts and seas of Peru, are doubtless the cause of the temperature and equability which constantly prevail there. For when we were advanced beyond the equinoctial, where these mountains left us, and had nothing to screen us to the eastward but the highlands on the isthmus of Panama, which are but mole-hills to the Andes, we then soon found that in a short run we had totally changed our climate, passing in two or three days from the temperate air of Peru to the sultry burning atmosphere of the West Indies. But it is time to return to our narration.