how I thrashed the old brig through it in my watch on deck! With what ardor of expectancy did I every day sit down to work out the sights! CHAPTER XV. THE WHITE WATER. The _Black Watch_ had sailed through the Downs in the middle of September, and on the morning of December 12, 1814, she was upon the meridian of Cape Horn, and in about fifty-seven degrees south latitude. This passage, for so swift a keel, was a long one. It was owing to diabolical weather between the degrees of forty and fifty south. Greaves and I would sometimes say that the devil was afloat in a craft of his own within that belt of ten degrees. Head winds more maddening to the most angelic soul, calms more provocative of impious and affrighting language, it is not in the imagination of the most seasoned mariner to conceive. But enough. We were off the Horn at last. Our bowsprit would be heading north presently, and, when our ship’s forefoot cut this meridian again, the little fabric would (but would she?) be deeper in the water (by what division of a strake?) with a cargo of minted silver! In 1814 much was made of the passage of the Horn. The doubling of that bleak, inhospitable, deep-seated rock was accepted, on the whole, as a considerable adventure. The old traditions of mountain-high seas and gales of cyclonic fury survived. The traffic down there was small; the colonies of New Holland were still raw in their making; and ships bound for Europe from that distant continent chose the mild but tedious passage of the South African headland. The old dread has vanished. Experience has footed prejudice out of time. In furious weather the ocean off the Horn is as terrible as the North Atlantic, as the Southern Ocean, as any vast breast of water is in furious weather; and that is the long and short of it. Oh, yes; off the Horn you get some monstrous seas, it is true. I have known what it is to be running off the Horn before a westerly gale and to be afraid--seasoned as I then was--_to look astern!_ But there is a safety in the mighty swing of those wide Andean heaps of brine which the sharper-edged surge of the smaller ocean does not yield. The old freebooters and the early navigators are responsible for the evil reputation of the Horn. They returned from the wonders of foreign sight-seeing, from the joys of plunder and the delights of discovery, with their hearts full of astonishment and their mouths full of lies. There is Shelvocke’s description of the Horn; it is heartrending reading in these days. The ice forms upon the page as you read; the atmosphere darkens with snow. And what, on the testimony of such a record, did Wapping think of that distant, ice-girt, howling navigation, with its enchanted islands and bergs, whose spires seemed to pink the moon? What did Wapping think when there was never a man in every company of a thousand jackets who had rounded the Horn and could tell of it?