On the 5th of June we parted from our convoy, the China ships; and, alas! many a good dinner we lost by that separation.  Our course lay more to the left, or eastward, as we wished to look in at the Cape of Good Hope, while those great towering castles, the tea ships, could not afford time for play, but struck right down to the southward, in search of the westerly winds which were to sweep them half round the globe, and enable them to fetch the entrance of the China seas in time to save the monsoon to Canton.  Each ship sent a boat to us with letters for England, to be forwarded from the Cape.  This was probably their last chance for writing home; so that, after the accounts contained in these dispatches reached England, their friends would hear nothing of them till they presented themselves eighteen months afterwards.  Neither did they expect to know what was passing at home till they should touch at St. Helena, on the return voyage, in the latter end of the following year.

I remember looking over the lee-gangway next day, at the first blush of the dawn, during the morning watch, and I could barely distinguish the fleet far to leeward, with their royals just showing above the horizon.  On taking leave of our convoy, we were reminded that there is always something about the last, the very last look of any object, which brings with it a feeling of melancholy.  On this occasion, however, we had nothing more serious to reproach ourselves with than sundry impatient execrations with which we had honoured some of our slow-moving, heavy-sterned friends, when we were compelled to shorten sail in a fair wind, in order to keep them company.  A smart frigate making a voyage with a dull-sailing convoy reminds one of the child’s story of the provoking journey made by the hare with a drove of oxen.

Our merry attendants, the flying-fish, and others which swarmed about us in the torrid zone, refused to see us across the tropic, and the only aquatics we fell in with afterwards were clumsy whales and grampuses, and occasionally a shoal of white porpoises.  Of birds there were plenty, especially albatrosses.  The captain, being a good shot with a ball, brought down one of these, which measured seven feet between the tips of the wings.  I have several times seen them twelve feet; and I heard a well-authenticated account of one measuring sixteen feet from tip to tip.  On the 22nd of June we came in sight of the high land on the northern part of the peninsula of the Cape of Good Hope, the far-famed Table Mountain, which looked its character very well, and really did not disappoint us, though, in general, its height, like that of most high lands, is most outrageously exaggerated in pictures.  The wind failed us during the day, and left us rolling about till the evening, when the breeze came too late to be of much use.  Next day we rounded the pitch of the Cape, but it blew so strong from the northward, right out of False Bay, accompanied by rain and a high sea, that we found