Port Desire to Patagonia
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find, especially as the season was advancing very fast, and we had no time to lose. From this time we continued to haul in for the land as the winds would permit, and kept a look-out for the islands of Sebald de Wert, which, by all the charts we had on board, could not be far from our track: a great number of birds were every day about the ship, and large whales were continually swimming by her. The weather in general was fine, but very cold, and we all agreed, notwithstanding the hope we had once formed, that the only difference between the middle of summer here, and the middle of winter in England, lies in the length of the days. On Saturday the 15th, being in latitude 50° 33’S. longitude 66° 59’W. we were overtaken about six in the evening by the hardest gale at S.W. that I was ever in, with a sea still higher than any I had seen in going round Cape Horn with Lord Anson: I expected every moment that it would fill us, our ship being much too deep waisted for such a voyage: it would have been safest to put before it under our bare poles, but our stock of fresh water was not sufficient, and I was afraid of being driven so far off the land as not to be able to recover it before the whole was exhausted; we therefore lay to under a balanced mizen, and shipped many heavy seas, though we found our skreen bulk-heads of infinite service.
The storm continued with unabated violence the whole night, but about eight in the morning, began to subside. At ten, we made sail under our courses, and continued to steer for the land till Tuesday the 18th, when, at four in the morning, we saw it from the mast-head. Our latitude was now 51° 8’S. our longitude 71° 4’W. and Cape Virgin Mary, the north entrance of the streight of Magellan, bore S. 19° 50’W. distant nineteen leagues. As we had little or no wind, we could not get in with the land this day; the
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Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from Volume I of the London 1773 Edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, page 25, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/hv01/061.html