Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/267

] but we hauled up two or three points to run close past her, showing a light, which she answered. We carried a press of sail during the night, and advanced rapidly on our course, being once more fairly on the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

Blowing a strong breeze from the westward, with frequent squalls and showers of rain, we derived advantage from being under the lee of Staten Island, which we passed at a distance of about fifty miles, but without seeing it, owing to the haziness of the atmosphere. At 6 we crossed a strong tide ripple, or meeting of currents, along which many beds of the beautiful macrocystis were collected together; and the colour of the ocean changed at once from a clear blue to an olive green.

At 8, when in latitude 53° 59′ S., and longitude 60° 47′ W., some bottles were thrown overboard, each containing a request that whoever found it would forward the enclosed paper to the secretary of the Admiralty, with the locality and date, in order to determine the set of the current in the vicinity of Cape Horn. It was my practice occasionally throughout the voyage to throw over several bottles at the same spot, made to float with different degrees of buoyancy, by loading them with unequal weights of fine dry sand; the deepest of these would of course be more influenced by the current than the prevailing wind; the lightest, on the contrary, would be carried forward on its course more by the wind than