that one may encounter heavy gales off the
Cape of Good Hope at any season of the year, but in the summer they
are less frequent and do not continue so long. And so with time enough
before me to admit of a run ashore on the islands en route, I shaped
the course now for Keeling Cocos, atoll islands, distant twenty-seven
hundred miles. Taking a departure from Booby Island, which the sloop
passed early in the day, I decided to sight Timor on the way, an
island of high mountains.

Booby Island I had seen before, but only once, however, and that was
when in the steamship _Soushay_, on which I was "hove-down" in a
fever. When she steamed along this way I was well enough to crawl on
deck to look at Booby Island. Had I died for it, I would have seen
that island. In those days passing ships landed stores in a cave on
the island for shipwrecked and distressed wayfarers. Captain Airy of
the _Soushay_, a good man, sent a boat to the cave with his
contribution to the general store. The stores were landed in safety,
and the boat, returning, brought back from the improvised post-office
there a dozen or more letters, most of them left by whalemen, with the
request that the first homeward-bound ship would carry them along and
see to their mailing, which had been the custom of this strange postal
service for many years. Some of the letters brought back by our boat
were directed to New Bedford, and some to Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

There is a light to-day on Booby Island, and regular packet
communication with the rest of the world, and the beautiful
uncertainty of the fate of letters left there is a thing of the past.
I made no call at the little island, but standing close in, exchanged
signals with the keeper of the light. Sailing on, the sloop was at
once in the Arafura Sea, where for days she sailed in water milky
white and green and purple. It was my good fortune to enter the sea on
the last quarter of the moon, the advantage being that in the dark
nights I witnessed the phosphorescent light effect at night in its
greatest splendor. The sea, where the sloop disturbed it, seemed all
ablaze, so that by its light I could see the smallest articles on
deck, and her wake was a path of fire.

On the 25th of June the sloop was already clear of all the shoals and
dangers, and was sailing on a smooth sea as steadily as before, but
with speed somewhat slackened. I got out the flying-jib made at Juan
Fernandez, and set it as a spinnaker from