The following days afforded great variety of weather, but it grew rapidly colder, and warm clothes which had been stowed since Madeira had to be brought out. The wind, which for a time was strong and fair, later veered round to the south-east and subsequently to the south-west. Our navigators were early anxious about the indications, fearing a _pampero_, the name by which the particular gales are known which sweep down from the Andes over the _pampas_ or great plains of the mainland, and on Monday, August 4th, the mainsail was stowed. Thursday we had a strong wind, accompanied by a most extraordinary display of lightning; from midnight till 5 a.m. the place was lighted up almost without intermission, and there were reported to be at times as many as five to eight flashes visible at once; at first there was no thunder, but subsequently it became audible. The next two days we beat against a head wind. On Saturday evening we were placidly seated at dinner when the cry came, “All hands on deck.” Suddenly, without at the last a moment’s warning, the _pampero_ was upon us. A half-finished meal was left to hurry up the companion and join in stowing sails. All night long the gale raged, straining at the rigging, tossing the ship from side to side, rattling everything in her above and below. The waves swept over the deck until it seemed as if their force might at any moment carry away the boats or burst in the door of the deck-house; notwithstanding the heavy storm-boards with which it was always barricaded at such times. There was no sleep for anyone on board. The steward was up all night making cocoa for those on deck, for it was bitterly cold. As to the watch below, “a man,” as Mr. Gillam said, “who could care so little what was going on above as to be able to sleep on such a night, simply because he was off duty, was no sailor worth the name.” Four a.m. found two of us engaged in meditating on the “wet sea boy” who managed to have his eyelids sealed on the giddy mast during “the visitation of the wind,” wondering whether he was an Elizabethan product or if we only owe his creation to the fact that Shakespeare was a landsman. I believe, from continued observation, that a good crew really like a gale, it has the “joy of battle.” As to the Stewardess, her journal, which is not given to soliloquising, runs, I find, as follows in connection with the _pampero_: “It has been made painfully clear to me that my presence on deck when things are bad is an added anxiety; this is humiliating, and will not, I trust, apply to the next generation of females.”