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Updated: June 23, 2025
The Hottentots, the mules, and the baggage having been landed, our preparatory work began in earnest. It consisted in proving the sextants; rating the watches; examining the compasses and boiling thermometers; making tents and packsaddles; ordering supplies of beads, cloth, and brass wire; and collecting servants and porters.
Having, as it were, quite lost our way round Cape Horn, and being sorely "admonished" by the Iceberg and other dumb councillors, the pilots, instead of taking to their sextants, and asking with a seriousness unknown for a long while, What the Laws of wind and water, and of Earth and of Heaven are, decide that now, in these new circumstances, they will, to the worthy and unworthy, serve out a double allowance of grog.
Notwithstanding the threatenings of a gale on the previous evening, the wind continued fair and moderate, and the ship was standing on under all sail. Breakfast was over, and the captain and mate, with Walter, were standing with their sextants in hand taking an observation to ascertain the ship's latitude.
The affair looked serious when the animal began to caper amongst Sturt's instruments, but luckily we secured him before any damage was done, though for some time theodolites, sextants, artificial horizons, telescopes, and compasses were in imminent danger.
It would also be a pleasant task to investigate the properties of the gnomon of the Chinese, Egyptians, and Peruvians, the scarphie of Eratosthenes, the astrolabe of Hipparchus, the parallactic rules of Ptolemy, Regimontanus Purbach, and Walther, the sextants and quadrants of Tycho Brahe, and the modifications of these various instruments, the invention and use of which, from century to century, bringing us at last to the telescopic age, or the days of Lippershay, Jannsen, and Galileo.
He afterwards came up with the old man and the stranger, proposing that the three should go in and examine it; but I positively refused to let them enter the tent together, for a bull in a china-shop were no hyperbole compared to pilfering savages in a tent among barometers, sextants and books.
"He is alone, collected, thoughtful, and tranquil, his eye fixed upon a chart. Now he observes the position of the sun, and marks the meridian; then he examines the compass, and notes the polary deviation. On all sides are sextants, quadrants, and chronometers. He quietly issues an order, which is echoed and repeated above, and thus augments the babel on deck."
With the "Iron Duke's" usual luck we encountered either boisterous head winds or flat calms all the way, compelling us to reef our canvas or to endure the tantalizing and provoking agony of witnessing our sails hang in picturesque, but useless, festoons up and down the masts. For ten days we scarce saw the sun; for ten days the sextants lay idle.
I had with me land-charts and compass, but nothing for taking altitude-observations: for the Speranza instruments, except one compass, had all been broken-up by her shock. However, on getting to the town of Silivri, about thirty miles from our start, I saw in the ruins of a half-standing bazaar-shop a number of brass objects, and there found several good sextants, quadrants, and theodolites.
That very day a change came over the even tenor of our lives; scarcely were our sextants stowed away, when, as the captain was walking the deck, I saw him frequently turn his glance to the westward. There, over the land, in a moment it seemed, arose a bank of clouds, which every instant grew denser and denser, and came rushing toward us across the sky.
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