FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
waving us adieu with a tiny handkerchief. We quarrelled 
for the rest of the day for whom her salute was in- 
tended. 
But who can write about blue dresses, and draw ships 
with this dismal gale again howling through our rigging 
and the poor Balsena trembling all over? This after- 
noon a sea struck us, that would have carried away an 
ordinary ship's bulwarks in splinters. It burst clean over 
our fore-yard ! The watch were lying out on it, reefing 
the fore-sail, and they had their boots filled! Another 
burst over our quarter, and enough went down the funnel 
to make things uncomfortable in the engine-room. As I 
write in my bunk, the water swishes from side to side as 
we roll, gurgling round my sea-boots. All the sail we 
have set is a close-reefed main-topsail, and our diminutive 
main staysail, a mere rag. Last night the sky and sea 
were as wild and ugly-looking as one could conceive, the 
sea was tossing wildly in dreary vistas of huge billows 
lit with the fitful gleams of cold sunset. There was one 
most extraordinary cloud effect, that I have never seen 
before, a canopy of cloud covered the sky, from the 
horizon almost to the zenith, this was dull blue-grey 
beneath, and showed white where its ragged edge met the 
blue above our heads. As we looked, out of the lower 
dark side there grew downwards some eight or nine extra- 
ordinary forms like fungi or fingers of a dull white colour, 
in no way beautiful, but ominous and uncanny in the 
extreme, and the like of which none on board had ever 
seen. The colour of the sea is green now, not the clear 
bottle-green we see in our seas at home, where there is 
