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Indian summer comes during September and October, when the days are sunny and warm, and then the long winter sets in again. Peaks above eight thousand feet are snow-clad on their crests and along their sides by deep drifts the year round. Along the Pacific coast in summer cool sea-winds, called trade-winds, blow in from the ocean, and 60 degrees is the average temperature.
Nor was it till long afterwards that I learned how much the force and direction of the Trade-winds are liable to modification by the particular position which the sun occupies in the heavens; or how far the rotatory motion of the earth, combined with the power which the sun possesses of heating certain portions of the circumambient air, are the regulating causes of the Trades, Monsoons, and, indeed, of all the other winds by which we are driven about.
Both admirals showed much skill and mastery of their profession, great wariness also, and quickness of eye; but it is wholly untenable to claim that a fleet having the weather-gage for five days, in the trade-winds, was unable to bring its enemy to action, especially when it is admitted that the latter closed the instant the wind permitted him to do so.
As the trade-winds blow from the north-east, the moisture with which they are saturated is condensed against the mountainsides, and flows backwards towards the Atlantic. The Pacific slope is, therefore, comparatively dry and salubrious as indeed are also the elevated table-lands of the interior. The whole region is subject to earthquakes, and numberless volcanoes rise in all directions.
To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud. What is true of this in the trade-winds is much more so in the variables, where changes run more to extremes.
The ocean of air is a vast maelstrom, boiling up always under the influence of the sun's heat at the equator, and flowing as an upper current towards either pole, while an undercurrent from the poles, which becomes the trade-winds, flows towards the equator to supply its place.
When clear of the tropics, one strikes in both hemispheres the westerly gales which are, so to say, the counter-currents of the atmosphere responding to the trade-winds of the equatorial belt almost as prevalent in direction, though much more variable in force.
There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart Listeth, will sail; Nor does he know how there prevail Despotic on life's sea, Trade-winds that cross it from eternity.
To the general impulsion which these trade-winds give the surface of the sea, we must attribute the equinoctial current, the force and rapidity of which are not sensibly modified by the local variations of the atmosphere.
Is there one chance in a thousand that even his indomitable spirit could have kept his craft headed steadily into the west? But because there were the trade-winds to bring him, the way was opened for the energetic people of Europe to possess the new continent. Thus the greatest stream of immigration commenced to flow, and the New World began to take on a European aspect.
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