John Wilson, I am told to say that "Antonio of Pico remembers him."

[Illustration: Chart of the _Spray's_ Atlantic voyages from Boston to
Gibraltar, thence to the Strait of Magellan, in 1895, and finally
homeward bound from the Cape of Good Hope in 1898.]




CHAPTER IV


Squally weather in the Azores--High living--Delirious from cheese and
plums--The pilot of the _Pinta_--At Gibraltar--Compliments exchanged
with the British navy--A picnic on the Morocco shore.

I set sail from Horta early on July 24. The southwest wind at the time
was light, but squalls came up with the sun, and I was glad enough to
get reefs in my sails before I had gone a mile. I had hardly set the
mainsail, double-reefed, when a squall of wind down the mountains
struck the sloop with such violence that I thought her mast would go.
However, a quick helm brought her to the wind. As it was, one of the
weather lanyards was carried away and the other was stranded. My tin
basin, caught up by the wind, went flying across a French school-ship
to leeward. It was more or less squally all day, sailing along under
high land; but rounding close under a bluff, I found an opportunity to
mend the lanyards broken in the squall. No sooner had I lowered my
sails when a four-oared boat shot out from some gully in the rocks,
with a customs officer on board, who thought he had come upon a
smuggler. I had some difficulty in making him comprehend the true