On the 1st of April, in latitude 23° 17′ north, and longitude 42° 50′ west, several tropic birds (_Phaeton oethereus_) were seen hovering over the ship; this was considered a very unusual circumstance, from the distance we then were from land. The longest distance these birds have been seen from land, has been stated to be three hundred miles, but by the observations at noon we were distant full one thousand miles from land; the nearest being the northernmost island of the Cape de Verd group. The distance at which birds supposed not to wander far from land, are sometimes seen, is surprising. Penguins have occasionally been met with several hundred miles from land, although they are commonly supposed not to wander from it any considerable distance. An intelligent lady informed me, that, during a voyage from England to Batavia, in the ship Orynthia, between the Cape and the latter place, a Penguin was shot, being rather more than a foot in length, and of a smooth slate colour over the body, with a white breast, (as well as can be recollected at a distant period,) the ship being then at a distance of eight hundred miles from the Marion or Crozette islands, with fine weather, nearly calm at the time. This occurred on the 22nd of October, 1831. Captain Beechey also states, (Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait, 8vo. vol. i. p. 16,) which tends to confirm the above fact, that, “as we approached the Falkland Islands from Rio Janeiro, some Penguins were seen upon the water in latitude 47° south, at a distance of three hundred and forty miles from the nearest land; a fact which either proves the common opinion that this species never stray far from land to be in error, or that some unknown land exists in the vicinity.” On the 31st of March, in latitude 22° north, and longitude 41° west, the Sargasso weed was first seen, a few pieces occasionally floating by the ship. That these plants are produced within the tropics, there can hardly be a question; but at what depth they vegetate is still involved in obscurity: neither is it clearly ascertained why the banks of weed should always occur in the same places. The supposition that they proceed with the Gulf Stream from the Gulf of Mexico—whence the original name of gulf weed—is now exploded. This weed is considered to extend between the eighteenth and twenty-second parallels of north latitude, and the twenty-fifth and fortieth meridians of west longitude. Mr. Neill justly observes, that “the gulf stream would convey them rather to the banks of Newfoundland than to the latitudes in which they usually occur; and it could not in any case accumulate them to the south of the Azores.”[94]