22 ENGLAND TO RIO DE JANEIRO CHAP, I 
I question whether our navigators are yet sufficiently apprised 
of it. Piso, in his Matwral History of the Brazils, says that 
the winds along shore are constantly to the northward from 
October to March, and to the southward from March to 
October. Dampier also, who certainly had as much ex- 
perience as most men, says the same thing, advising ships 
outward bound to keep to the westward, where they are 
almost certain to find the trade more easterly than in mid- 
channel, where it is sometimes due south, or within half a 
point of it, as we ourselves experienced. 
6th. Towards evening the colour of the water was 
observed to change, upon which we sounded and found 
ground at thirty-two fathoms. The lead was cast three 
times between six and ten without finding a foot’s difference 
in the depth or quality of the bottom, which was encrusted 
with coral. We supposed this to be the tail of a great shoal 
laid down in all our charts by the name of Abrolhos, on which 
Lord Anson struck soundings on his outward bound passage. 
7th. About noon long ranges of a yellowish colour appear 
upon the sea, many of them very large, one (the largest) 
might be a mile in length and three or four hundred yards 
in width. The seamen in general affirmed roundly that 
they were the spawn of fishes, and that they had often seen 
the samé appearance before. Upon taking up some of the 
water thus coloured, we found it to be caused by innumerable 
small atoms, each pointed at the end, and of a yellowish 
colour, none of them above a quarter of a line in length. 
In the microscope they appeared to be fasciculi of small 
fibres interwoven one within the other, not unlike the nidé 
of some Phryganew, which we call caddises ; what they were, 
or for what purpose designed, we could not even guess, nor 
so much as distinguish whether their substance was animal 
or vegetable. 
8th. At daybreak to-day we made the land, which 
proved to be the Continent of South America, in latitude 
21°16’. About ten we saw a fishing-boat, whose occupants 
told us that the country formed part of the captainship of 
Espirito Santo. 
