pitched forwards we could see a large part of her bottom, and when her stern went down we could see all her deck.  A boat, hung at her stern davits, was stove in by the waves.  The officers on board the “Ariel” thought that it was all over with us:  we imagined that they were suffering more than we were.  Nautical men may suppose that this was a serious storm only to landsmen; but the “Orestes,” which was once in sight, and at another time forty miles off during the same gale, split eighteen sails; and the “Pioneer” had to be lightened of parts of a sugar-mill she was carrying; her round-house was washed away, and the cabin was frequently knee-deep in water.  When the “Orestes” came into Mosambique harbour nine days after our arrival there, our vessel, not being anchored close to the “Ariel,” for we had run in under the lee of the fort, led to the surmise on board the “Orestes” that we had gone to the bottom.  Captain Chapman and his officers pronounced the “Lady Nyassa” to be the finest little sea-boat they had ever seen.  She certainly was a contrast to the “Ma-Robert,” and did great credit to her builders, Ted and Macgregor of Glasgow.  We can but regret that she was not employed on the Lake after which she was named, and for which she was intended and was so well adapted.

What struck us most, during the trip from the Zambesi to Mosambique, was the admirable way in which Captain Chapman handled the “Ariel” in the heavy sea of the hurricane; the promptitude and skill with which, when we had broken three hawsers, others were passed to us by the rapid evolutions of a big ship round a little one; and the ready appliance of means shown in cutting the hawser off the screw nine feet under water with long chisels made for the occasion; a task which it took three days to accomplish.  Captain Chapman very kindly invited us on board the “Ariel,” and we accepted his hospitality after the weather had moderated.

The little vessel was hauled through and against the huge seas with such force that two hawsers measuring eleven inches each in circumference parted.  Many of the blows we received from the billows made every plate quiver from stem to stern, and the motion was so quick that we had to hold on continually to avoid being tossed from one side to the other or into the sea.  Ten of the late Bishop’s flock whom we had on board became so sick and helpless that do what we could to aid them they were so very much in the way that the idea broke in upon us, that the close packing resorted to by slavers is one of the necessities of the traffic.  If this is so, it would account for the fact that even when the trade was legal the same injurious custom was common, if not universal.  If, instead of ten such passengers, we had been carrying two hundred, with the wind driving the rain and spray, as by night it did, nearly as hard as hail against our faces, and nothing whatever to be seen to windward but the occasional gleam of the crest of a wave, and no sound heard save the whistling of the storm through the rigging, it would have been absolutely necessary for the working of the ship and safety of the whole that the live cargo should all have been stowed down below, whatever might have been the consequences.