determined to prosecute his voyage to New Holland by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He sailed from the Downs on January 14th, 1699. His intention was to proceed to Pernambuco, and thence directly to the coast of New Guinea; but scarcely had a month elapsed when the crew began to give trouble, to mutter their dislike of the proposed voyage, and even to talk of obliging him to return to England. At Pernambuco, owing to the distance of the anchorage from the town, the men would have found it easy to slip the vessel's cables and run away with her; and not choosing to venture any risk of this kind, Dampier steered for Bahia de Todos los Santos. This was a considerable trading-port in his time, formed of about two thousand houses. He found upwards of thirty large ships lying in the bay, and speaks of a busy traffic in linen and woollen goods, in hats and silk stockings, in biscuit, wheat, flour, and port wine. His closeness of observation is once again exhibited in all that he has to say about this place. Nothing escapes him. He gives you a long catalogue of all the vegetables and fruits of the district, of the birds, beasts of prey, dogs, monkeys, hogs, and the like, and then comes to the sea, from which he produces a list of twenty-three different kinds of fish. He sailed on April 3rd, and made a fair course for the coast of New Holland. The quality of the reckoning of even an expert mariner in those days may be gathered from his telling us that, seeing a large black bird flying near the ship, he suspected that he was much nearer the Cape of Good Hope than he had imagined, since it was well understood that this sort of bird is never to be met with farther than ninety miles from land. By his own account, he was two hundred and seventy miles from the Cape; but next day, meeting a vessel named the _Antelope_, bound to the East Indies from Table Bay, he found that L'Agulhas bore only twenty-five leagues distant. The inaccuracy of the computations of those times must needs excite the wonder of our own age of exact science. In Matthew Norwood's _System of Navigation_, “teaching the whole Art in a way more familiar, easie and practical than hath been hitherto done,” published in 1692, though from internal evidence I gather it to have been compiled in 1683-84, there is a catalogue of the longitudes and latitudes “of the most principal places in the world, beginning from the meridian of the Lizard of England.” The latitude, as a rule, is tolerably approximate, but the longitude is very much otherwise. For instance, the Cape of Good Hope is said to be in 34° 24´ S. latitude, and in 25° 33´ E. longitude. Cape Frio is put down as in 22° 55´ S. latitude, and 33° 59´ W. longitude. Cape Blanco is entered as 47° 30´ S. latitude, 62° 52´ W. longitude![15] These are representative of the whole of this singular table of calculations. Yet Norwood was greatly esteemed as a navigator, and his book was to be found in most ships' cabins.