For several days the men have been setting up the rigging fore and aft, and they are now finishing the mizzen-top-gallant, royal and sky-sail backstays. It was a tedious job, but intensely interesting to watch, and I had never seen it done before on a square-rigger, as the other ship’s rigging was set up with turnbuckles. Latitude, 3° 22′ north; longitude, 27° 50′ west. +June 5+ We think that we have taken the southeast Trades, though the wind as yet is nothing to the eastward of south. Last evening the dense rain-clouds and vapory masses of the Doldrums gave way to a clear sky dotted with trade clouds, and a lovely night followed, the moon in the first quarter being visible for the first time in many days. We had also a magnificent view of the southern heavens, with the golden Cross now well up, wheeling slowly through the sky, the finest constellation in the south. Immediately beneath, though a little to the left of, the Cross a strange thing is to be observed in the shape of what seems to be a large pear-shaped blot in the surrounding stars, bearing a close resemblance to a dark cloud, about the same size as the Cross itself. Within this space, which sailors call the Black Cloud, not a single star can be observed with the naked eye, though the sky round about the Cross in every other direction is thick with stars of the third and fourth magnitude. At eight o’clock this evening we tacked ship for the third or fourth time to-day, and by reason of so much practice this herculean task was accomplished with a little less noise than before. Still, the disturbance was very great, with a prodigious amount of shouting and bad language from the skipper, which once more rose to a climax when one of the fore buntlines caught on something, just after he had sung out “Let go and haul.” Captain Scruggs, who was standing at the extreme forward end of the cabin-house, here executed a few fantastic steps to relieve his mind, and being clearly outlined in the moonlight, he made a very idiotic appearance. The manœuvre of tacking on this occasion, by the way, was a very impressive one, the white moon-beams transforming the dull gray canvas into cloths of satiny sheen as the great yards revolved to maintop-sail haul. It must be said that the captain was justified to-day in kicking at the weather. The breeze was of the very faintest sort, and as often as we tacked ship the wind actually seemed to jump around and head us off, so that, after we were once more braced up on the port tack this evening and the wind shifted back and into the south, heading us off to nearly west, we really began to pity the skipper. The phosphoric display here is the most beautiful which we have ever seen. Our wake every night is a swirling, gyrating, writhing path of liquid fire, in which glitter thousands of apparently incandescent globes as large as billiard-balls, with now and then a suggestion of fiery serpents twisting and wriggling through the glowing mass.