146 



PORTER'S JOURNAL, 



one of that description of black turtle formerly mentioned ; 

 and as many were desirous of proving its qualities, it was 

 brought on board, and found to be superior to any we had 

 yet tasted. After supplying my own table and that of iht 

 officers of the ward-room, it furnished an abundant meal to 

 six messes of the ship's company, consisting of forty-eight 

 men. We here also caught a number of shags and pen- 

 guins, and killed some pelicans and other aquatic birds. 



In the morning I stood out of the bay with the land- 

 breeze, which, since we have been here, has constantly 

 sprung up at sunrise, and continued to blow until about ten 

 o'clock, when, after a calm of an hour or two, the sea-breeze 

 has set in from the westward, which continued until sun- 

 down ; the rest of the twenty-four hours has been perfectly 

 calm. I made the signal to speak the Barclay ; and on 

 captain Randall's coming on board, he assured me that 

 the English whalers were somewhere to the north, where 

 they had been unavoidably swept by the current. This I 

 could hardly credit, when we had found such difficulty in 

 getting into the bay from the southward ; but he assured 

 me, that notwithstanding the southerly current we had to 

 contend with to the south of the bay, 1 should find it to the 

 north running equally strong northerly 5 and, strange as it 

 may appear, 1 found it absolutely the case 5 for in standing 

 a little more out of the bay, and to the north of North 

 Head, or Cape Berkley, we experienced a current setting 

 northerly, which carried us with great rapidity. As we 

 approached Point Albemarle, (which is the northernmost 

 extremity of the island of that name, aud off which lies a 

 reef of rocks, extending about two miles,) the weather be- 

 came hazy ; and while searching around the horizon with 

 my perspective, I was at length cheered with the sight of 

 what I believed to be a sail. Numbers of others on board 

 were under the same illusion ; all hands were called to 

 make sail ; and in a few minutes another was discovered. 

 We now began to believe that fortune had become tired of 

 trying our patience, and beran already to make some esti- 

 mation of their probable value, and form some plan of dis- 

 posing of them ; but to our mortification the illusion soon 

 vanished, and it appeared we had been cheated by two 

 sand banks, whose appearance had been so strangely alter- 

 ed by the intervention of the fog, as to assume precisely the 



