it was a period of great jubilation to us all, but it did not last long as our stay in the country was only to be a fortnight. We were to leave full of cargo, frozen meat, and passengers, but before we got away my chairman came to lunch on board. He told me to express his satisfaction to the ship’s company generally, but said he could not say enough to me. As a sign of his appreciation, however, he had cabled home that I was to have the big new ship and could always count upon him as a friend. It must have been a bad spell of weather about that period, for it took fifteen days to get to the Horn. There was a great deal of head wind and sea, for I find in my abstract “pitching bow and stern under,” and a record of bad weather generally, while before we rounded the Horn we found that we had lost one of our propeller blades. This was a bad job, for it gave the engines a very jumpy action, and was equivalent to entirely spoiling the passage, for we could never now pick up the time we had lost. I have since thought that the foundry where these particular blades were cast must have hit upon a streak of bad metal, for I certainly seemed to have the luck of losing blades which was not shared by any other of our ships. Our ill fortune lasted us to Rio; but before we got there I had one little excitement that may as well be chronicled. It was the custom of the ship, weather permitting, for the crew to bring out and air bedding, and clean out their quarters for inspection by me on Saturday mornings. This had been done hitherto without a murmur reaching my ears. The weather prior to rounding Cape Horn was too bad to permit the weekly routine, but when we were drawing near to fine weather I gave the usual order, and was astonished to hear that the firemen refused to comply. I really cannot remember now, but I think the seamen did; at all events, I gave the order to muster on the poop, and the malcontents obeyed the order. Now if they had graduated in a rowdy sailing-ship in the ’sixties and had meant business, they would have remained in the forecastle and placed the onus of getting them out upon me. But they were modern recreants and did not understand the particular methods by which a skipper may effectively be set at defiance. As soon as they had quitted the forecastle and come on the poop, I had the doors of their quarters shut and guarded, effectively cutting off retreat. Then calling over the names as they stood on the ship’s articles, I asked the first man if he intended to clean his quarters. His reply was that his mates in London had told them that they were not to obey that particular order. My reply was that they could reckon with their mates in London when they got there, but that in the meantime they had to reckon with me, here and now. A renewed refusal and my order was “irons,” duly carried out. Five men went through the same formula, and the rest gave in; they were all kept aft and sent forward in batches to do their share of the work.