Dinner was over in the cuddy by seven. The captain and military officers went on to the poop to smoke, and I carried coffee to them whilst Frank waited upon Mr. Bates and his brother mate. The doctor, who did not smoke, and who drank his wine well watered, descended the booby-hatch to acquaint the prisoners with his intentions, and to make the necessary arrangements. It was a true tropic night, splendid and silent. Often do I recall that night, and always with a bitter sense of the blindness of the human mind, of our incapacity to see one minute ahead of us. The moon at this hour was rising, and the lunar dawn lay in a streak of dim red along the eastern seaboard. I do not remember the hour; it was not yet eight bells; in the west was a fast-waning flush, for we floated in a part of the ocean where the night crosses the sea in a stride. Not a breath of air! The waters stretched flat as a surface of polished ebony, and only at intervals there ran a sighing sort of movement over the sea, which sent a delicate stir through the canvas, and set the dew raining from aloft in little pattering showers. In the south there was much lightning; the leap of the violet sparks flashed up the battlements and ragged brows of a mass of electric cloud. The water reflected the play, and sometimes a little note of distant thunder came humming across the glass-smooth surface. Elsewhere under the brightest of the stars hung tremulous wakes of silver fire. Even now, early as it was, the mighty shadow of the ocean night was majestic and awful with the wild, flashful colouring of lightning in the south, and the dustlike multitude of stars over the three glooming spires of our ship, and the rising moon rusty-red and imperfect and distorted, as though lifting heavily through some noxious belt of African river vapour. What I saw, however, was quickly embraced by my sight. Having put the gentlemen’s coffee upon the skylight, I durst not linger. The steward found me plenty to do till a quarter before nine. I then went to my cabin to refresh myself with a wash. When I came into the cuddy again, I found the lamps turned down and heard a sound of many feet in motion. I stepped into the recess and found nobody there. I walked a little way forward along the gangway alley, and looking up at the poop, saw the guard drawn in a line near the rail. The awning was furled, and the moonlight sparkled on their firearms, and the bayonets glanced as the lightning leapt in the south. A division of convicts was in the inclosure, standing in dusky groups, and at every man’s feet stretched his shadow, with scarcely a move of the clean black line of it, so reposefully did the ship sleep. I saw a crowd of seamen on the forecastle and heard women’s voices, and guessed that the wives had gone forward to view the eclipse.