After our collecting tour we assembled at the home of the chief sealer. Here the customary native hospitality was extended to us with open arms. The women prepared _maté_, the South American tea, while the men brought out their most precious varieties of alcohol and cigarettes. The good people of the entire encampment, about fifty in number, then assembled to do us honour. Among these there were a few _gauchos_, the South American prototypes of our own cowboys, and two or three travellers en route to Montevideo from Rio Grande do Sul; all the others were engaged in the various departments of sealing. They had taken many seals the year before, and 16,000 during the previous season, all of these from the rocks which surround the cape. The seals are of a common variety, yielding oil and leather but no fur. As we departed we were loaded with presents and treated and toasted again with _maté_ and brandy, ingredients as necessary to South American hospitality as whisky and cigars to the success of an old time political meeting in the United States. At four o’clock on the morning of the tenth, we tipped our anchor and drew out of the little harbour, steaming into the Plata, close to its northern bank. Throughout the day we had the low sandy beds of Uruguay on our port bow. On these there was an occasional group of cactus, but they seemed from a distance like projecting rocks and, aside from the relief which they afforded, there was nothing to break the monotony. It was one long, nearly level bank of lifeless sand. In the back ground an occasional row of blue hills marked the position of a warm and more promising country. On the morning of the eleventh the scene had noticeably changed. We had passed Cape Maldonado during the night and were heading for Flores Island in a direct course for Montevideo beyond. The land no longer presented the sterile sand-driven beach, but gray wind-rasped hills, separated by patches of forest and fronted by prominent highlands which stood out boldly against a clearing sky. The temperature rose quickly as we advanced into the river. We passed Flores Island at two o’clock, and dropped anchor in the horseshoe bend which forms the imperfect harbour of Montevideo.