In about latitude 9° N. we ran out of the doldrums and into a fresh breeze from the southwest, which the captain said was the southwest monsoon. I did not then know what a monsoon was. It sounded like simoon and typhoon, and I knew that some of them were ferocious and terrible things, but I was not at all sure which was the worst. It was the strange and foreign sound, I have no doubt, that scared me. If typhoons had been called simple hurricanes they would not have seemed nearly so bad. I had studied about typhoons and simoons and monsoons, and other winds, in my physical geography at school, but they had meant nothing to me but names, largely because they were nothing but names to my teacher. How could they be anything more? When we ran into it we found that the monsoon—this one, at any rate—was nothing to be afraid of. It is a sort of seasonal trade wind, due to the nearness, in this case, of the continent of Africa. We changed our course to southeast, and held it until we ran into the southeast trades a few degrees farther south; then changed again, running nearly west at first, to accommodate the ship to the wind, which at first was nearly south. The wind got around more to the eastward as we went on, and when we crossed the line we could lay a southwest course. We crossed the equator in about longitude 25° W. The actual crossing occurred at night, but I think that fact had nothing to do with the attitude of the men toward that important event. They took absolutely no notice of it, and I do not believe that more than two or three of them thought of it at all. In the latitude of Cape St. Roque and Pernambuco, the usual tracks for sailing ships from the United States {142} and Europe to Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope converge because of the trade winds. The tracks of vessels, either sail or steam, from Cape Horn and the eastern ports of South America naturally pass through the same somewhat narrow area; but although it seems narrow when you see it on a chart, it covers six or seven degrees of longitude, which is about four hundred miles in this latitude. The chance of meeting ships here is, therefore, not so great as any one might suppose, but we did see five ships in four days. We spoke none of them, although we did try to speak one, a big ship which Captain Nelson thought was bound to New York. He wanted to send letters, and we all hastily got together what we had to send—there was no time to write more than a half dozen words—and made up a packet.