142 SOUTH AGAIN : NEW ZEALAND AND THE CAPE 
sister, ' allowing brotherly affection to outweigh patriotism,' 
was strictly speaking a contravention of rules, which, if it 
reached official ears, might get him into hot water with his 
commander. The young officers, securing spare specimens 
for themselves sub rosa, were occasionally hard put to it to 
escape detection. 
The Captain [he writes to his father on November 25, 
1842] has a noble collection of Birds in casks, — a most noble 
one. I do not let him know that I skin any at all, for he 
is a capital specimen himself of a Naturalist, no more do 
Smith or Oakeley, and you would laugh to see us playing 
bopeep along the deck as he comes along, for he has an eye 
hke a hawk, and the moment he suspects, —the sooner you 
give up with a good grace the better. I had a narrow 
escape the other day with a noble Maccaroni Penguin with 
gold feathers and crest, by jumping down the main hatch 
as he came up the after one. 
The spare sets of specimens for his father had to pass 
officially through the hands of the Admiralty and the British 
Museum ; but at the Museum, Kobert Brown was ' better 
than the regulations,' and facilitated Sii' William's examination 
of the plants. 
Hence, accordingly, the urgent tone of the following passages 
from a letter to Sir Wilham (December 5, 1842),though hghtened 
by a reference to Boss's epistolary anxieties which, as will be 
seen later, very nearly chanced on the explanation. 
There is another subject which annoys me exceedingly, 
and is the only one in the course of the Expedition which 
does : it is the following passage in a letter from my mother 
dated August 1 : 
' . . . Your drawings (you need not tell Captain Boss, 
unless he would like to hear it) are known far and wide.' 
I thought in my letters I explained my wishes on that sub- 
ject fully to you all, so much so that I feared to trouble you 
too often by positive desire that they should be known but 
to few, and as to ' unless Captain Boss would like to hear it,' 
I surely have said often enough, or at least given it fully to 
be understood, that I had no business whatever to send 
