Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/104

46 lobsters, which have been seen by almost every one passing through these seas; they were, however, so far from colouring the sea red, as Dampier and Cowley say they do, that I may affirm that we never saw more than a few hundreds of them at a time. We called them Cancer gregarius.

3rd. This evening many large bunches of seaweed floated by the ship, and we caught some of it with hooks. It was of immense size, every leaf four feet long, and the stalk about twelve. The footstalk of each leaf was swelled into a long air-vessel. Mr. Gore tells me that he has seen this weed grow quite to the top of the water in twelve fathoms; if so, the swelled footstalks are probably the trumpet-grass or weed of the Cape of Good Hope. We described it, however, as it appeared, and called it Fucus giganteus.

5th. In some of the water taken up we observed a small and very nimble insect of a conical figure, which moved with a kind of whorl of legs or tentacula round the base of the cone. We could not find any Nereides, or indeed any other insect than this, in the water, but were not able to prove that he was the cause of the lightness of the water, which was much observed hereabouts, so we deferred our observations on the animal until the morning.

7th. We now for the first time saw some of the birds called penguins by the southern navigators: they seem much of the size and not unlike Alca pica, but are easily known by streaks upon their faces and their remarkably shrill cry, different from that of any sea-bird I am acquainted with. We saw also several seals, but much smaller than those I have seen in Newfoundland, and black; they generally appeared in lively action, leaping out of the water like porpoises, so much so that some of our people were deceived by them, mistaking them for fish.

During a gale which had lasted yesterday and to-day we observed vast numbers of birds about us. Procellariæ of all kinds we have before mentioned; gray ones and another kind, all black, Procellaria æquinoctialis? Linn. We could not discern whether or not their beaks were yellow.