A long voyage to Australia and India was another matter. The diary and “letters home” of a captain and his wife could tell us that; and while not brilliant in themselves, such records give us the atmosphere of these old times as could perhaps nothing else. On a February 16, some sixty years ago, a captain writes to his children who were in boarding-school: “We have had a very long and dull passage, with many calms and head winds, and are only to the equator and thirty-nine days out. It has tried my patience pretty well; but I can’t make winds or weather.” His wife was with him, and he was also taking a passenger on this voyage to Australia. “It is very warm and fine after a few days of hard rain when we caught plenty of water so we can wash as much as we like, and clothes belonging to all hands are hung out drying all over the ship. While I am writing the rest are reading and sitting around the cabin with as little clothing on as possible. I imagine you at church, muffled up in cloaks and furs, listening to a good sermon while we have to do our own preaching. If I’d had a letter ready a few days ago, I could have sent it by a barque bound up to New York which I spoke. Yet it would have been difficult, as it was in the evening and I could not understand who she was, and don’t know that she understood our name. Mother busies herself sewing when she feels like it, and reads the rest of the time. I must bid you good-morning now and attend to getting an observation and see where we are.” On February 28 he continues the letter: “I am now about where I expect to pass the Sunrise, if nothing has happened to her. I look for her every day. I don’t know what poor Freeman would say if we should meet them.” Freeman was the oldest son who had insisted on going to sea to “toughen” himself in a losing fight with “consumption”; and here on the wide stretches of the southern seas his father hoped to have word with him. “Mother is sewing on old clothes of some sort,” he went on to tell them, “and if she is well I think she will have time to mend all up. Time passes rapidly, but I often think of our little home being shut up and how many happy days we spent there, and hope we may all live to spend many more.” He ends his week’s stint of writing with some excellent moral advice. March 3: “We are now going for the Cape of Good Hope with a moderate breeze and good weather. Mother has been washing a little, and is now much taken up with some story she is reading. I suppose it is washing day at home, and I fancy Mrs. Lincoln hanging her clothes in our yard.” March 15: “Good-morning, my dear children. I wish I could hear you answer to it, but thousands of miles now separate us and every day still more. We are now abreast of the Cape, and have had some rough weather since I wrote last. Mother is first-rate, and can eat as much salt junk as any of us. To-day she is ironing a little, and I have been pitching quoits with the passenger for exercise.