On Friday morning, August 15th, land became visible, and by 2 o’clock we were off Flores Island, the entrance to Rio Plata, where we took up a pilot for its navigation. The river is there about a hundred miles across, but narrows rapidly, and two hours later we were opposite Monte Video, where it is only half that width. Of Monte Video itself we could see only the outline. We proposed visiting it later by one of the steamers which run there every night from Buenos Aires, but were discouraged from doing so by the report that there was nothing whatever to see except an inferior Buenos Aires, and that the seaside resorts in the neighbourhood, which were filled in the summer by the Argentines, would be closed at that time of year. The Plate River is dull and dreary, having the charm neither of a river nor of the open sea; it consists of a vast expanse of turbid yellow water, marked by buoys and the wrecks of ships which have gone aground on its dangerous shoals. The western bank only was visible, and that was low-lying, with a suspicion—was it only a suspicion?—of tall chimneys. We felt that as far as beauty went we might as well be at the mouth of some English mercantile river, and certainly, as was remarked, we had much better have been there from the point of view of getting the needed work done on the ship. A number of insects of all sorts appeared on the yacht when we were at least four miles from the shore, suggesting that, if so many could land on one small ship, many millions must be blown out to sea.