How little, how pitifully little departure we made in the last week! On Tuesday, six days ago, we rounded Cape St. John, and now we are only a degree farther west! I should think it _was_ hard to make westing off the Horn. Call it forty miles in a week, for the degrees of longitude are scarcely thirty-five miles long in this latitude. Six miles of westing a day! Speaking of the length of degrees, though, it is remarkable how much farther south of the line the Horn seems (56° south) than 56° north seems north of it. For instance, the fifty-sixth northerly parallel passes between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and is not very far north of Hamburg; yet but few persons would suppose that, roughly speaking, these cities were in the same relative latitude as the southern extremity of South America. Last evening, just before dark, a sail was sighted about ten miles to leeward, and was there still this morning. It was a ship, and we conjectured that she was the “Dowes” until the glasses showed that she had a standing spanker-gaff, which made her a foreigner. Perhaps she is the demon Frenchman; may she approach no nearer. One of the men at the wheel, Jack Michaels, whispered to me this morning, “Say, was that land the Diego Ramirez we saw yesterday?” And when told that we were still east of Cape Horn, the poor fellow ejaculated, “Oh, my God!” so earnestly and sorrowfully that it spoke whole volumes for what the men are suffering in the leaky forecastle. Two men are constantly at the wheel now, and even when the tiller is lashed and we are hove to, the law compels one man to stand with his hands on the spokes as though still steering, so as to be ready in case of accident. Well, it looks as though we were going to have a worse night than ever for sleeping; last night we got only three hours of rest. Latitude, 56° 54′ south; longitude, 65° west. +July 20+ “The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled.”