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Updated: June 18, 2025
This morning I laid the cable down to Fort Genois in style; and now we are picking up odds and ends of cable between the different breaks, and getting our buoys on board, &c. To-morrow I expect to leave for Spartivento. And now I am quite at an end of journal keeping; diaries and diary letters being things of youth which Fleeming had at length outgrown.
Spartivento looks more wild and savage than ever, but is not without a strange deadly beauty: the hills covered with bushes of a metallic green with coppery patches of soil in between; the valleys filled with dry salt mud and a little stagnant water; where that very morning the deer had drunk, where herons, curlews, and other fowl abound, and where, alas! malaria is breeding with this rain.
To-day Sunday not much rest. Mr. Liddell is at Spartivento telegraphing. We are at Chia, and shall shortly go to help our boat's crew in getting the small cable on board. We dropped them some time since in order that they might dig it out of the sand as far as possible. "June 21.
We get six sheep, and many fowls too, from the priest of the small village, and then run back to Spartivento and make preparations for the morning. Poor little things! they died at once, with their little bells and delicate bright tints.
We get six sheep, and many fowls too, from the priest of the small village; and then run back to Spartivento and make preparations for the morning. "June 18. "The big cable is stubborn, and will not behave like his smaller brother. The gear employed to take him off the drum is not strong enough; he gets slack on the drum and plays the mischief.
Wednesday morning, I started for Spartivento and got there in time to try a good many experiments.
The stipulated period of our stay off Cape Spartivento having at length expired, Captain Hood broke open the packet to which reference has already been made, and having acquainted himself with the farther instructions therein contained, orders were forthwith issued to make sail to the northward and westward.
The conversation, which had been interrupted for a moment, was renewed: it was agreed that without saying anything about the new plans, they would clear Cape Spartivento and enter the Adriatic; then the king and the general went below again to the lower deck.
I nearly paid dear for my obstinacy, however; for in the evening I had alternate fits of shivering and burning. The next extracts, and I am sorry to say the last, are from Fleeming's letters of 1860, when he was back at Bona and Spartivento and for the first time at the head of an expedition.
I tested at once, and by the very first wire found it had broken towards shore and was good towards sea. This was of course very pleasant; but from that time to this, though the wires test very well, not a signal has come from Spartivento. I got the cable into a boat, and a gutta-percha line from the ship to the boat, and we signalled away at a great rate but no signs of life.
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