We saw several whales on our way up the Channel, but they were wild, and we got none of them. We did not even get fast, but had a good many hours of heartbreaking pulling. Opposite Mozambique, about a hundred miles offshore, more or less, the Prince got an iron into one, but it drew, and the whale got away. I overheard Captain Nelson talking to Mr. Baker, one day, about the wildness of the whales. He seemed to think it evidence that they had been chased a good deal, and to be inclined to abandon the Channel at once, and keep right on to the northward to the Seychelles. Mr. Baker did not combat the captain’s opinion openly, but he was so obviously disappointed and so confident that we should do better on the return trip through the Channel that the captain did not insist upon it. We had seen no whalers. I had been having my lessons—my hours with Mr. Brown—pretty regularly, right along. When we had to chase, or had a whale alongside, of course we had to give it up, but we had not been interrupted by cutting-in and trying-out for about two months. I had added the study {214} of geography to the curriculum. I wanted to know more about the regions which we visited, and although there was usually nothing to be seen but a vast expanse of ocean, I knew that there was some land near, and the fact was a stimulus to the acquisition of knowledge about it, whatever it was. There was not a geography on the ship, but it was no loss worth mentioning. I got what I could from the maps and charts we had, and Mr. Brown supplied the rest, for he highly approved the broadening of the curriculum, although it gave him more work. Already I could almost put my finger on some islands which I had never heard of at school, and Mauritius and Réunion were as definite as Nashawena and Cuttyhunk. I had seen Bazaruta from a distance, although my geography authority at school—a gentle, modest girl, who probably had very little more definite ideas on the subject than I had—had never heard of such an island. Almost every whaling captain knew it pretty well, for it was a place to get wood. It was a different thing actually to see the low-lying coast of Africa, south of Mozambique, or the bold shores north of it, with a glimpse of the high table-land behind, from what it was to read vaguely about them all, quietly seated at my desk in North Street. I knew the general shape of Madagascar, and thought of it as a good enough island of moderate size, with the Mozambique Channel perhaps thirty miles wide. It came to me with somewhat of a shock to find that the Channel was five times as wide as from New Bedford to Nantucket, and that Madagascar was about as long as from New Bedford to Chicago. Chicago was less important in 1872 than it is now, and it was less than a year since Mrs. Kelly’s cow had kicked over the lamp, the beacon that led to greatness.