2 INCIDENTS OF THE VOYAGE. 



in his huge unwieldiness, and making " the deep to be 

 hoary," was an incident which, though far from new 

 to me, was not without interest ; — I looked on the 

 vastest of known animals. On another day, when 

 about 160 miles S.W. of Madeira, the sailors, with 

 a surface line, " caught the Bonito," a beautiful 

 pearly fish of the mackarel family, with rainbow 

 stripes on the sides. The bait, which proved too 

 enticing for him, was the same as that with which his 

 more familiar, but not less beautiful, cousin is often 

 taken, a piece of red rag. The stomach was found 

 to be distended with a multitude of small Snipe- 

 fishes [Centriscus), all of the same size, about two 

 inches and a half long. A living specimen of the 

 same Snipe-fish was drawn up on the same day in a 

 bucket of water. The Centriscus is described by 

 Risso as rarely wandering far from the shore, and as 

 delighting in the mud at the bottom of the shoal sea. 

 But the facts just mentioned suggest very different 

 habits. The Bonito is well known to be a surface 

 swimmer ; and his morning's meal having been ex- 

 clusively made of the Centrisci, combines, with the 

 living specimen lifted in the bucket, to prove that the 

 latter is also a surface-species, while the locality shows 

 it to be pelagic. 



In mid-ocean, eleven hundred miles from the 

 nearest point of land, a large Turtle, probably of the 

 Loggerhead species {Chehne carcttd), swimming on 

 the surface, was disturbed in his recreation by the 

 approach of the ship, and dived with a splash into the 

 security of the clear depths below. And as we ap- 

 proached the lovely Archipelago, toward which my 



