Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/306

 150 dampier's voyages.

but when we came out again into deeper water they left us. Indeed, the noise that they made by blowing and dashing of the sea with their tails, making it all of a breach and foam, was very dreadful to us, like the breach of the waves in very shoal-water, or among rocks. The shoal these whales were upon had a depth of water sufficient, no less than twenty fathom, as I said ; and it lies in latitude 22° 22'. The shore was generally bold all along ; we had met with no shoal at sea since the Abrohlo-shoal, when we first fell on the New Holland coast in the latitude of 28°, till yesterday in the afternoon, and this night. This morning also, when we expected by the draught we had with us, to have been eleven leagues off shore, we were but four ; so that either our draughts were faulty, which yet hitherto and afterwards we found true enough as to the lying of the coast ; or else here was a tide unknown to us that deceived us ; tho' we had found very little of any tide on this coast hitherto. As to our winds in the coasting thus far, as we had been within the verge of the general trade (tho' interrupted by the storm I mentioned) from the latitude of 28°, when we first fell in with the coast : and by that time we were in the latitude of 25° ; we had usually the regular trade -wind (which is here S. S. E.), when we were at any distance from shore : but we had often sea and land breezes, especially when near shore, and when in Shark's Bay ; and had a particular N. west wind, or storm, that set us in thither. On this 18 of August, we coasted with a brisk gale of the true trade-wind at S.S.E., very fair and clear weather ; but haling off in the evening to sea, were next morning out of sight of land ; and the land now trending away N. easterly, and we being to the nor ward of it, and the wind also shrinking from the S. S. E. to the E. S. E. (that is, from the true trade-wind to the sea-breeze, as the land now lay) ; we could not get in with the land again yet a-while, so as to see it, tho' we trim'd sharp and kept close on a wind. We were this 19th day, in latitude