FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
the hand-and-forearm measurement used, I should judge 
them to run from a quarter to two pounds weight. 1 As 
we talked of these things fishy, there came one running 
who told us there was yet another whaling ship ; and we 
went forth, and lo, as he said, there was another — at least 
we could see the spars of a ship that looked like a 
whaler appearing opposite us over the low land on 
either side of the narrow entrance to the loch. As we 
looked a whale-boat came rowing through the Narrows. 
In it was Captain Robertson of the Active. They had 
also come in without a pilot but had dropped their anchor 
in the roadstead. They had made the passage in ninety 
days some odd hours, a trifle less than the time we had 
taken — two record passages for slowness, I should think. 
But they had suffered more than we had off the Irish coast. 
They lost two boats and their mizzen topmast and had 
the galley smashed up with a heavy sea. What we envied 
them for was that they had called at Madeira for coals, 
and had surfeited on fruit, and at sea they caught a turtle 
that kept them in fresh meat for weeks. 
Dr. Donald, whom Bruce and I had last seen at Uni- 
versity Hall, Edinburgh, was in the boat, so we held a 
great palaver. We then went to pay our respects at 
Government House. I think His Excellency Sir Roger 
Tuckworth Goldsworthy must have been rather appalled 
when he saw the eighteen feet five inches of piratical- 
1 These trout do not belong to the true Salmoitidae^ but to an allied family, 
the Haplochitonidae, which in the south represents the trout of the northern 
hemisphere. See Captain J. Gumming Dewar's interesting account of the 
voyage of his yacht the Nyanza. 
