How great a factor in the making of a successful passage under sail this personal acquaintance with the route pursued is, may be easily assessed from a superficial study of the ways of the Swansea copper-ore traders. These are, or rather, I ought to say, were, smart barquentines which sail, or sailed, from Swansea, bound round Cape Horn from east to west, for the purpose of bringing home ore to the world-renowned smelting-works of Wales. Their masters were not, in any sense of the word, fine gentlemen, their calling hardly admitted of the cultivation of the graces of life; but such was their knowledge of this, the most arduous piece of navigation in the whole world, that their passages were made with almost steamer-like regularity. Only seamen themselves could give to these perfect mariners all the praise that was their due. For all sailors know, either by experience or repute, how cruelly hard are the conditions attached to forcing a passage around that awful promontory that reaches down almost to the Antarctic Circle, deep into the chosen habitation of the fiercest and most persistent gales that rage around the planet. Here, for weeks on end, you shall feel the weight of an unfaltering westerly gale, with all its accompaniments of snow and sleet and darkness. One would say that the attempt to get round the Horn from east to west, in the teeth of such prevalent conditions, was madness, especially when the long record of disaster attendant upon these attempts is known. Many a case is on record where fine ships, after weeks of abortive struggle to get to the westward round Cape Horn, have at last given up the fight, put the helm hard-up, and fled before the inexorable westerly gale, right round the world, to reach such a port as San Francisco, for instance. Yet these little Swansea men came and went, from year to year, with the utmost regularity; their skippers having learned by experience how to out-manœuvre even the terrible monarch of the southern sea. No doubt it was a hard life; but it was exultant, triumphant. These men knew how good their seamanship was, how exact their weather-lore, and they troubled meteorological charts not at all.