All hands were busy looking
at it,-- the captain and mates from the quarter-deck, the cook
from his galley, and the sailors from the forecastle; and even Mr.
Nuttall, the passenger, who had kept in his shell for nearly a
month, and hardly been seen by anybody, and whom we had almost
forgotten was on board, came out like a butterfly, and was hopping
round as bright as a bird.
The land was the island of Staten Land, just to the eastward of
Cape Horn; and a more desolate-looking spot I never wish to set
eyes upon,-- bare, broken, and girt with rocks and ice, with here
and there, between the rocks and broken hillocks, a little stunted
vegetation of shrubs. It was a place well suited to stand at the
junction of the two oceans, beyond the reach of human cultivation,
and encounter the blasts and snows of a perpetual winter. Yet,
dismal as it was, it was a pleasant sight to us; not only as being
the first land we had seen, but because it told us that we had
passed the Cape,-- were in the Atlantic,-- and that, with
twenty-four hours of this breeze, we might bid defiance to the
Southern Ocean. It told us, too, our latitude and longitude better
than any observation; and the captain now knew where we were, as
well as if we were off the end of Long Wharf.
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