A First Year in Canterbury Settlement | Page 9

S.E. trades, and was welcomed by all with the
greatest pleasure. In two days more we reached the line.
We crossed the line far too much to the west, in longitude 31 degrees 6
minutes, after a very long passage of nearly seven weeks, such as our
captain says he never remembers to have made; fine winds, however,
now began to favour us, and in another week we got out of the tropics,
having had the sun vertically overhead, so as to have no shadow, on the
preceding day. Strange to say, the weather was never at all oppressively
hot after latitude 2 degrees north, or thereabouts. A fine wind, or indeed
a light wind, at sea removes all unpleasant heat even of the hottest and
most perpendicular sun. The only time that we suffered any
inconvenience at all from heat was during the belt of calms; when the
sun was vertically over our heads it felt no hotter than on an ordinary
summer day. Immediately, however, upon leaving the tropics the cold
increased sensibly, and in latitude 27 degrees 8 minutes I find that I
was not warm once all day. Since then we have none of us ever been

warm, save when taking exercise or in bed; when the thermometer was
up at 50 degrees we thought it very high and called it warm. The reason
of the much greater cold of the southern than of the northern
hemisphere is that the former contains so much less land. I have not
seen the thermometer below 42 degrees in my cabin, but am sure that
outside it has often been very much lower. We almost all got chilblains,
and wondered much what the winter of this hemisphere must be like if
this was its summer: I believe, however, that as soon as we get off the
coast of Australia, which I hope we may do in a couple of days, we
shall feel a very sensible rise in the thermometer at once. Had we
known what was coming, we should have prepared better against it, but
we were most of us under the impression that it would be warm
summer weather all the way. No doubt we felt it more than we should
otherwise on account of our having so lately crossed the line.
The great feature of the southern seas is the multitude of birds which
inhabit it. Huge albatrosses, molimorks (a smaller albatross), Cape hens,
Cape pigeons, parsons, boobies, whale birds, mutton birds, and many
more, wheel continually about the ship's stern, sometimes in dozens,
sometimes in scores, always in considerable numbers. If a person takes
two pieces of pork and ties them together, leaving perhaps a yard of
string between the two pieces, and then throws them into the sea, one
albatross will catch hold of one end, and another of the other, each bolts
his own end and then tugs and fights with his rival till one or other has
to disgorge his prize; we have not, however, succeeded in catching any,
neither have we tried the above experiment ourselves. Albatrosses are
not white; they are grey, or brown with a white streak down the back,
and spreading a little into the wings. The under part of the bird is a
bluish-white. They remain without moving the wing a longer time than
any bird that I have ever seen, but some suppose that each individual
feather is vibrated rapidly, though in very small space, without any
motion being imparted to the main pinions of the wing. I am informed
that there is a strong muscle attached to each of the large plumes in
their wings. It certainly is strange how so large a bird should be able to
travel so far and so fast without any motion of the wing. Albatrosses
are often entirely brown, but farther south, and when old, I am told,
they become sometimes quite white. The stars of the southern
hemisphere are lauded by some: I cannot see that they surpass or equal

those of the northern. Some, of course, are the same. The southern
cross is a very great delusion. It isn't a cross. It is a kite, a kite upside
down, an irregular kite upside down, with only three respectable stars
and one very poor and very much out of place. Near it, however, is a
truly mysterious and interesting object called the coal sack: it is a black
patch in the sky distinctly darker than all the rest of the heavens. No
star shines through it. The proper name for it is the black Magellan
cloud.
We reached the Cape, passing about six degrees south of it, in twenty-
five days after crossing the line, a very fair passage; and since the Cape
we have done well until a week