l company of us--three gentlemen and
two ladies--left New York harbor in the schooner Louisa Dyer, of 150
tons burden, bound to the island of Jamaica. By nightfall we had lost
sight of the last faint trace of New Jersey soil. New Jersey is
sometimes jocularly said to be out of the Union; but on that day the two
of us who were leaving our native land for the first time, entertained
no doubt of its solidarity with that country of which it afforded us the
last glimpse. By morning we found our small and incommodious vessel
fairly on her way through the stormy November Atlantic, toiling
painfully over the broad convexity of the planet, like a plodding
insect, toward the regions of the sun. After a voyage of fifteen days,
wrestling with all manner of baffling winds, and with storms attended, I
suppose, with some danger, though, from a happy incapacity of
apprehending peril at sea till it is over, I suffered no disquiet from
them, we came in sight of the two inlets which form the Turk's Island
passage. A winter voyage, however unpleasant, has this advantage, that
then only can you be sure of meeting with such a succession of storms as
shall leave settled in the memory the sullen sublimity of that
'changing, restless mound' of disturbed ocean in which is embodied the
mass of its gloomy might.

Very pleasant was it to us, nevertheless, when the softening airs and
the steady set of the breeze showed us that we had come into the
latitude of the trade winds. The inky blackness of the sea had gradually
turned into translucent and then into transparent azure, which looked as
if it could be quarried out into blocks of pure blue crystal. The flying
fish, glancing in quick, short flights above the sunny waters, now gave
the charm of happy, graceful life to our weary voyage out of the
tempestuous north. And when at last we saw land, although it appeared
only in the shape of the two small islands mentioned above, which seem
to be little more than coral reefs covered with a scanty carpet of
yellowish grass, yet the few distant cocoanut trees upon them threw even
over their barrenness that tropical charm which to those who first feel
it seems rather to belong to another planet than to this dull one upon
which we were born.

Passing through the narrow channel between the two islands which formed
thus the portal of our entrance into the Caribbean, we found ourselves
fairly afloat upon the waters of that brilliant sea, which the
Spaniards, t