Such difficulties surround, and such dangers attend that navigation, that I do not understand how we to-day could navigate that coast, were the magnetic needle to lose its virtue. Impelled by the eddy from America, the Atlantic draws down the African shore. There is below Mogadore a night breeze from the sea; the land is low, and stretches in a line of sand-banks or breakers. There are no inlets and no shelter, and certain destruction awaits the mariner on a lee shore, on which a current sits. Their vessels did not lie closer to the wind than seven points, and could never get off. Is this a navigation to be performed by creeping along the shores and dragging up vessels on the beach at night? and for five hundred miles of the northern coast, there is a continuous range of breakers without shelter of any kind, and no port which can be entered except over a bar, and in fine weather, so that there is a wholly inaccessible coast, equal in length to the Mediterranean sea. Major Rennell, in his work on the “currents of the Atlantic,” estimates the daily easting of a vessel at _seventeen miles_, so that between the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Madeira islands, a vessel is carried out of her dead reckoning to the eastward, according to the length of the voyage, _from eighty to two hundred miles_. It is thus, that so frequently vessels with chronometer, quadrant, charts, and log, besides compass, have been wrecked on the African coast, when believing themselves to be in the longitude of Teneriffe, or even further to the westward. One of the sufferers, Ryley, master of an American vessel, has given us a lively description of such a scene, and of the shore on which it occurred;[196] and has assigned as the cause of his misfortune, the indraught both of current and wind, and the impossibility of getting off the coast when once thus got upon it. Even after his vessel had struck he could see no land. And what is the fate of the survivors? Death by thirst or slavery. The nature of the inhabitants has no more changed than that of the shore:--what the one spares, the other will devour. The land of Europe is high: its coasts are provided with harbours, tides run along it, and vessels can tide their way; but the African coast is unseen till you are upon it; there is no escape when within reach of it. It lies all along the course of the voyage; it presents certain destruction to the vessel, and if evitable death, inevitable slavery to the crew. The coasters of the Mediterranean, the circumnavigators of Europe, the monsoon traders of India, were not matched with the difficulties of such a sea; they were unacquainted with the terrors of such a land.[197]