I would have sailed from here direct for Bahia, at which port—as being the nearest to Trinidad—it was my intention to fill up with water and other necessaries before commencing our chief operations; but as letters were awaiting many of us at St. Vincent in the Cape Verdes I decided to call at that island on the way.
At 9 a.m., September 25, we weighed anchor and sailed to St. Vincent. The distance is a little under 900 miles, which we accomplished in seven days.
For the first three days we encountered south to southeast winds, with fine weather. On September 28 the wind veered to the northeast, being thus right aft. As the boom of our racing spinnaker was a very heavy spar and formed a considerable top weight while standing along the mainmast in the usual way, we unshipped it from its gooseneck and laid it on deck.
We had now come into a region of strong trades. The wind was fresh and squally and we ran through the night with the tack of our mainsail triced well up and our mizzen stowed.
On the following day, September 29, the glass was still falling, and the sea running up astern of us was occasionally high and steep. There were signs of worse weather coming, so we prepared for it by striking the topmast, lowering our mainsail, and setting our trysail. The day’s run was 174 miles.
The glass had given us a false alarm after all; for on the following day the wind moderated, and we were enabled to hoist our large balloon foresail; but a heavy sea was still rolling up from the northeast. It was evident that a gale had been recently blowing over the disturbed tract of ocean which we were now crossing.
The Cape Verde islands are frequently enveloped in clouds, so that they cannot be distinguished until one is quite close to them. This had been my former experience and the same thing occurred now. In the night of October 1, we knew that we were in the vicinity of the island of St. Antonio, the northernmost of the archipelago, but right ahead of us there stretched a great bank of cloud, concealing everything behind. At last, however, a squall partly cleared the rolling vapour and we perceived, a few miles distant, the black mountainous mass of the island, whose volcanic peaks rise to a height of upwards of 7,000 feet above the sea. Then the bright flash from the lighthouse on Bull Point became visible.
The islands of St. Vincent and St. Antonio are separated from each other by a channel two leagues broad, so I decided to heave to in sight of the St. Antonio light until daybreak.
We got underway again at dawn, October 2, and in a few hours were lying at anchor in Porto Grande Bay, St. Vincent. This desolate island, which is an important coaling station and nothing else, inhabited by a robust but ruffianly race of negroes, has been often described; a mere cinder-heap, arid, bare of verdure, almost destitute of water, it is the most dreary, inhospitable-looking place I know, and the volcanic soil seems to soak in the rays of the tropical sun and convert it into a veritable oven at times. But the dismalness of nature is atoned for by the cheeriness and hospitality of one section of the population. For the white community here is almost entirely composed of Englishmen, the staff of the Anglo-Brazilian Telegraph Company—of which this is a very important station—and the employees of the two British coal-kings of the island. Though there had sprung up a new generation of these young fellows since I had visited the island in the “Falcon,” yet I met several old friends whose acquaintance I had then made.
Porto Grande, miserable place as it still is, had improved a good deal since I had seen it last. There are hotels here now of a sort, and at one of these on the beach, kept by a pleasant Italian and his Provençal wife, we found it possible to lunch and dine very decently. I notice that I have a tendency in this book to speak of little else save the gastronomic possibilities of the ports I called at in the course of the voyage. But I had visited and described all these places before, and that is some excuse, for the sights were not new to me, whereas a good dinner seems always to have the freshness of novelty. This may sound disgustingly greedy to a sedentary and dyspeptic person; but may I ask whether every sound Britisher does not look upon the quality of his food as one of his most important considerations during his travels abroad. How natural, then, was it that seafarers like ourselves, who were seldom in port and whose diet for months consisted chiefly of tough salt junk and weevily biscuit, should be more vividly impressed by a luxurious meal on shore than by all the lions of these foreign lands.
Here one of the volunteers, our poor old purser, generally known on board as the bellman, left us, and returned to England. The state of his health rendered it unwise for him to proceed further on a voyage of this description.
Suspecting that I might lose others of my crew, I looked round Porto Grande for two fresh paid hands. This is a very bad place to pick up sailors in, but I was lucky in my search. I shipped two young coloured men from the West Indies—one a native of St. Kitt’s and, therefore, an English subject, and the other a Dutchman, hailing from St. Eustatius. These two negroes, whose names were respectively John Joseph Marshall and George Theodosius Spanner, had been loafing about Porto Grande for some time in search of a vessel. The poor fellows had been jumped from a Yankee whaler that had called here.
“Jumping,” I may explain, for the
