In one of his autobiographic sketches the late Bishop Strachan says that he sailed from Greenock in the end of August, 1799, “under convoy,” and such was then the wretched state of navigation, he did not reach Kingston, by way of New York and Montreal, till the 31st of December. In a letter before me an aged friend recites the story of his adventurous voyage from Liverpool to Quebec, some fifty years ago. The ship was a superannuated bluff-bowed East Indiaman, but counted good enough in those days to carry five hundred emigrants across the stormy Atlantic. When ten days out they encountered a hurricane which drove the vessel out of her course. Her three masts fell overboard. The cook’s galley and the long boat, the water casks, and everything else on deck, vanished in the gale. The huge hulk rolled like a log in the Bay of Biscay for several days, the passengers meanwhile being confined between decks in horrible confusion. A passing steamer towed them back to Plymouth, where six weeks were spent in refitting the ship, each adult receiving ten shillings and sixpence per week for board and lodging until the repairs were completed. After seven weeks more of great discomfort “and tyrannical treatment on the part of the captain,” they finally reached Quebec in 107 days after first embarking at Liverpool. My own experience of sailing ships, though fifty-seven years have elapsed, is still fresh in mind and recalls some pleasant memories. My first voyage to New York was from the Clyde in a new American ship, commanded by one Captain Theobald, a typical New Englander, as fine a man as one could desire to meet. The voyage was uneventful in the ordinary sense of the term, but one’s first voyage in a sailing ship is an event never to be forgotten. It was anticipated with peculiar interest, and regarded with far greater importance than attaches to crossing the Atlantic nowadays. So far from being monotonous, there were incessant changes in sea and sky, in the dress of the ship, and the occupations and songs of the sailors. One day the ship might be bowling along beautifully, decked out in her royals and sky-sails, her studding-sails and stay sails; next day, perhaps, she might be scudding under reefed topsails before an easterly gale, pooping seas that washed the quarterdeck and tumbled like a waterfall into the waist of the ship. Occasionally, a “white squall” coming up would make things lively on deck while it lasted. If becalmed in the right place we caught codfish. For the most part, however, the familiar refrain of “tacks and sheets” would be heard many times a day and in the night watches, as we tacked this way and that way against westerly breezes, thankful if the log showed that we had advanced on our course forty or fifty miles in twenty-four hours.