126 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
which Audubon had borrowed from his friend, and as 
the ship was then ready to sail, the date of his voyage 
on the Hope is very closely fixed. 
After his vessel had passed Sandy Hook and was 
opposite New Bedford, the captain, in order, as he 
averred, to make necessary repairs, ran her into that 
port, where they passed a week. This was thought to 
be only a ruse on the captain’s part to gain time, for, 
having recently married, he wanted a holiday on shore; 
accordingly he had ordered a few holes bored below 
the waterline in the bows of his ship. When they finally 
put to sea in earnest, they passed “through an im- 
mensity of dead fish floating on the surface of the wa- 
ter,” a remark which now recalls stories of the famous 
tilefish, once thought to be extinct, which have been 
found floating dead in vast numbers in that part of the 
Atlantic. After nineteen days out the Hope entered 
the Loire and anchored at Paimbceuf, the lower harbor | 
of Nantes; this was in February, and not far from the 
eighteenth of that month. 
