His stout faith in his ship was matched only by Humphrey’s unwavering confidence. Others might have said that this maiden voyage of his first command was a heart-breaking one, for many of his men were untrained seamen, grumbling at their narrow quarters and heavy labor, while the art of handling the new vessel was, in itself, not easy to acquire. The weather was boisterous and the winds fitful, but the _West Wind_ did not betray the two good friends who had brought her into being. The storms lent her wings so that, at last, anxiety and discontent gave way entirely to pride in the speed that she was making. There was a certain grizzled old sailor, however, who openly discredited all claims of the ship’s prowess, and who even refused to believe the evidence of the day’s reckoning. “Twenty-three days is the best she will do,” he vowed over and over again. “I will stake a year’s pay on it that she can’t make an hour less.” Yet, on the nineteenth day of their passage, a warm, gusty afternoon of early May, when the far horizon swam in haze, it was he who came himself to the captain and broke through all etiquette to report, round-eyed with amazement— “There’s land been sighted, sir, and I don’t understand it at all. It—it looks like Gibraltar!” So she came through the gates of the Mediterranean, a gentle breeze behind her, “sails all filled and asleep” as the seamen said, a swift slender hull under a cloud of snowy canvas. She pushed into the straits where had plied back and forth the daring Phœnician craft, the Roman galleys and the high-pooped ships of Venice and of Spain, but she was no lesser vessel than any one of them, for she was the first of the Yankee clipper ships! I have never seen those North African cities, Tangier and Tunis and the rest, and I have no doubt that to-day they are very little like what Humphrey Reynolds saw. But his stories have come down to me so clear and vivid, that I almost feel that I have known those very places with their white houses, their tropical green, the confusion and chatter of foreign tongues in the narrow streets, the hushed silence of the wide, walled gardens. For long months the American warships would lie off these ports, keeping a watchful eye upon the doings of the dusky potentates and arch-pirates who ruled them. The officers and men would go ashore to stare at the strange sights and to bargain for souvenirs among the street vendors, seemingly oblivious of the scowling, hostile faces about them.