For the next fifteen minutes a scene was enacted that absolutely defied a description worthy of it. The huge, shaggy seas came rushing along astern, full sixty feet from crest to trough; and when close by, if you wanted to follow their progress, you had to throw your head back as though looking up at a mountain peak, while they shook their white manes like wild horses, and it seemed as if they must crash over the stern. But no, the ship rode them superbly, and when she reached the crest of one, and we looked deep down into that dark-green, foam-streaked valley astern, we caught our breath as the billows ran under us and fell thundering upon the main-deck forward. The sight of the great ship with nothing set but the three lower topsails, flying before the gale, almost choked you with emotion. It was grand, it was fearfully sublime. It was the apotheosis of the power and majesty of God. [Illustration: A fifty-foot Cape Horn gray-beard] An albatross, too, in a storm is a wonderful sight. No matter how furious the gale, no matter how fierce the terrific, hurricane squalls of Cape Horn, the great bird soars up against the blast grim and serene. Then wheeling, he comes sweeping down on the wings of the gale at a speed so tremendous that it cannot be less than eighty or even ninety miles an hour, when, describing a low but immense circle, with the tip of his lee wing just brushing the tops of the giant seas, he again takes his flight upward against the storm. No living creature conveys the idea of boundless freedom so perfectly as the King of Space, the Wandering Albatross. By two o’clock in the afternoon we had the relieving tackles on the tiller, and when darkness came after a sickly, pallid sunset, it found us hove to in a mountainous sea, with the same angry squalls yelling in savage, ruthless glee over this desert ocean. Latitude. 56° 12′ south; longitude, 67° 24′ west. +July 17+ Last night the gale diminished somewhat; but at eleven o’clock the chain topping-lift of the spencer-gaff carried away, and we had to rig a makeshift with a tackle until to-day.