Rice and Hunt stood one watch, Cary and I the second, and here Rice, though a good sailor and an experienced yachtsman, finally succumbed.  We hauled everything down with infinite difficulty, owing to the violent motion, and made it fast, then let her roll and pitch to her heart’s content.  A sorrier looking place than our wardroom, and a sicker set of fellows it would be hard to find.  The dishes had some play in the racks, and kept up an infernal racket that I tried in every way to stop and could not.  To cap all, the wind came off a gale northwest about 4 A.M., and made yet another sea.  As soon as possible we set a double-reefed foresail, and then I turned in.  When I turned out at noon we had made Newfoundland and set a whole foresail, jib and one reef out of the mainsail.  We were becalmed, but found excellent fishing, so did not care.  The sea had gone down and we began to enjoy the Norway-like rugged coast of Newfoundland.  The mountains come right down to the water, and are about 1,400 feet high, by our measurement, using angular altitude by sextant and base line, our distance off shore as shown by our observation for latitude and longitude.

There are many deep, narrow-mouthed coves and harbors, a good number of islands and points making a most magnificent coast line.  In many cases 50 or 75 fathoms are found right under the shore.  Great patches of snow, miles in extent, cover the mountain sides.  Great brown patches, which the professor thinks are washings from the fine examples of erosion, but which look to me like patches of brown grass as we see in Penobscot Bay on the islands, vary with what is apparently a scrubby evergreen growth and bald, bare rocks.  As we are about 18 miles off, the blue haze over all makes an enlarged, roughened and much more deeply indented Camden mountain coast line.  The bays are in some cases so deep that we can look into narrow entrances and see between great cliffs, only a few miles apart, a water horizon on the other side.  We wished very much to get in towards the shore, but the calm and very strong westerly current, about 1-1/2 knots, prevented.

While enjoying the calm in pleasant contrast to our late shaking up, it will be well to introduce the members of the party whom Bowdoin has thought worthy to bear her name into regions seldom vexed by a college yell, and to whom she has entrusted the high duties of scientific investigation, in which, since the days of Professor Cleaveland, she has kept a worthy place.

[Members of the Expedition] In command is Prof.  Leslie A. Lee, of the Biological Department of Bowdoin.  With a life-long experience in all branches of natural history, the experience which a year in charge of the scientific staff of the U.S.  Fish Commission Steamer “Albatross” in a voyage from Washington around Cape Horn to Alaska, and an intimate connection with the Commission of many year’s standing, and the training that scholarly habits, platform lecturing and collegic instruction have given him, you see a man still young, for he was graduated from St. Lawrence University in 1872, and equal to all the fatigues that out-of-door, raw-material, scientific work demands.