longitude 29° 30′ W. At noon she was two miles south of the line. The southeast trade-winds, met, rather light, in about 4° N. , gave her sails now a stiff full sending her handsomely over the sea toward the coast of Brazil, where on October 5 , just north of Olinda Point, without further incident, she made the land, casting anchor in Pernambuco harbor about noon: forty days from Gibraltar, and all well on board. Did I tire of the voyage in all that time? Not a bit of it! I was never in better trim in all my life, and was eager for the more perilous experience of rounding the Horn.
It was not at all strange in a life common to sailors that, having already crossed the Atlantic twice and being now halfway from Boston to the Horn, I should find myself still among friends. My determination to sail westward from Gibraltar not only enabled me to escape the pirates of the Red Sea, but, in bringing me to Pernambuco, landed me on familiar shores. I had made many voyages to this and other ports in Brazil. In 1893 I was employed as master to take the famous Ericsson ship Destroyer from New York to Brazil to go against the rebel Mello and his party. The Destroyer , by the way, carried a submarine cannon of enormous length.
In the same expedition went the Nictheroy , the ship purchased by the United States government during the Spanish war and renamed the Buffalo . The Destroyer was in many ways the better ship of the two, but the Brazilians in their curious war sank her themselves at Bahia. With her sank my hope of recovering wages due me; still, I could but try to recover, for to me it meant a great deal. But now within two years the whirligig of time had brought the Mello party into power, and although it was the legal government which had employed me, the so-called “rebels” felt under less obligation to me than I could have wished.
During these visits to Brazil I had made the acquaintance of Dr. Perera, owner and editor of El Commercio Jornal , and soon after the Spray was