16 '° THE VOYAGE. 
getting ready, I took a turn over the Company’s 
wharf and round the town. 
The Wharf, built on piles driven into the 
coral reef, extends about a thousand feet in 
length, and forty in width, with a depth of 
water at its landing-end sufficient to float the 
largest ship. ‘The piles are from the forests of 
Maine, and have to be coppered above high- 
water-mark, to resist the destroying power 
of a boring worm (Teredo jimbriata), that 
would otherwise destroy them in a very few 
months. The Freight Department is a hand- 
some stone structure, three hundred feet long by 
eighty wide, through the arched entrance to 
which is a triple line of rails. 
Man, it is said, differs from all other animals, 
in being ‘a tool and a road-making animal,’ the 
truth of which was well exemplified in the 
curious assemblage of products collected from 
all parts of the world, and stowed in this 
huge house, brought by man’s ocean highways, 
and awaiting removal by his iron roads and 
horses. 
Ceroons of cochineal and indigo from Guate- 
mala and San Salvador, cocoa from Ecuador, 
sarsaparilla from Nicaragua, coffee from Costa 
Rica, hides from the North and South Pacific 
_ coasts, copper-ore from Bolivia, linen goods 
