266 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF 
sailer), when we were most agreeably surprised to find her 
the Royal Admiral, who had left Port Jackson four days 
after we had sailed. The weather was very favourable for 
our communication, and Captain Fotheringham, the com- 
mander, came on board, with a budget of rare English news, 
to the 31st of March last, which he had received from an 
outward-bound Indiaman, met with on the south side of the 
equator. The Royal Admiral had made better weather of it 
than we had, easterly to Cape Horn, which she doubled in 
something more than six weeks; her passage having been 
not a little diversified by seeing Campbell’s Island, the land 
of Cape Horn, and by having fallen in with many icebergs, in 
lat. 59° S. the summits of some of which were estimated at 
six hundred feet above the sea; afterwards, however, she 
was much becalmed, and thus it was we were enabled to 
come up with her. Light winds kept us together several 
days, and visits were occasionally paid to and from both 
vessels ; at length, however, a breeze sprung up, to which we 
set every stitch of canvas that would draw, and soon taking 
the lead, we left our consort far behind, and have not seen 
her since. Some two or three days afterwards, we fell in 
with a brig, the Three Sisters, from Bahia to Guernsey, 
laden with sugar. From her captain and one of her passen- 
gers, whom we invited on board, we received a long account 
of the revolution that had taken place in Brazil, and of the 
abdication of Don Pedro. Nothing worthy of mention 
occupied our attention after we lost sight of the Three Sis- 
ters, until two days ago, when we passed a French brig, very 
heavily laden, and as we gave her the go-by, we simply ex- 
changed each other’s longitude, by chalking it on boards; 
ours by chronometer, was 12° W, and the Frenchman’s, by 
dead reckoning, 11° W. I have now told you all about our 
voyage ;—two or three words, then, about ourselves. I have 
been so much on shipboard, and long since seen the necessity 
of studying to be on good terms with all persons one might 
be doubled up with in a voyage, that in this I laid myself 
