The best authentic day’s run which I know of was made by the ship in which we sailed from New York to Calcutta three years ago, on her next eastern voyage to Anjer. She was running her easting down in ballast not far from Amsterdam Island, and from noon to noon on one occasion she sailed three hundred and fifty-one miles, an average of fifteen miles an hour; I mean knots, of course. Captain Kingdon wrote to me of this performance from Passaroean, and asserted positively that it was done by some of the best observations which he ever got in the Southern Ocean, and that dead reckoning had nothing to do with it. Indeed, that whole passage was a very quick one, as he went out to Java in eighty-three days from New York, and broke the record, as far as he knew, from the longitude of Cape Agulhas to Anjer, having covered that immense distance in twenty-one days. I told Captain Scruggs about this, and he doubted it, until he learned the vessel’s name. “Oh,” said he, “the ‘Mandalore’; well, maybe she did. I saw her in the dry-dock once, and there never was such a bottom on a merchant ship; ’twas like a yacht’s.” And, in truth, the handsomest vessel which I ever saw, taken as a whole, alow and aloft, was the “Mandalore” of London, built at Stockton-on-Tees. Seen, as we often saw her afterwards, moored in the Hooghly at Calcutta, among scores of the finest sailing ships in the world, she was the star of the fleet, the pride and very life of her captain. Poor, dear old Kingdon! The voyage on which he broke the record from Good Hope to the Straits of Sunda was the last he ever made. The “Mandalore” sailed from Banjoewangie, bound to Boston on the return passage, but called a few weeks later at Table Bay with the captain sick. He pluckily continued, though against the doctor’s orders, but was soon afterwards landed at St. Helena ill with cancer, the vessel proceeding in charge of the mate. Captain Kingdon then went by steamer to London _via_ Madeira, but was too far advanced in life for an operation, so he was ordered to Cairo, in the hope that the dry atmosphere would prolong his life. But his constitution was not able to hold out much longer, and two months after his arrival in Egypt died Ray Kingdon, true friend, master mariner, gentleman. Latitude, 11° 25′ north; longitude, 33° 14′ west. +May 28+ The wind god is so exceedingly gracious to us at present that I cannot but think that he is saving himself to swoop down upon us in fell wrath at the Horn. Here we are bowling merrily along within five hundred miles of the equator, doing two hundred and twenty miles in the twenty-four hours, with an unlimited prospect of wind ahead; and if we could maintain this speed of nine knots, we would cross the line on Sunday, nineteen days from New York. There are sure to be several days of calms between the Trades, though, so let us call it twenty-five days.