and baffling at all seasons; and sometimes calms prevail for
several days. This tract of ocean was once known as the "horse
latitudes," because many years ago vessels from Connecticut were
in the habit of taking deck-loads of horses to the West India
islands, and it not unfrequently happened that these vessels,
being for the most part dull sailers, were so long detained in
those latitudes that their hay, provender, and water were
expended, and the animals died of hunger and thirst.

The Dolphin was a week in crossing three degrees of latitude.
Indeed it was a calm during a considerable portion of that time.
This drew largely on the patience of the captain, mate, and all
hands. There are few things so annoying to a sailor at sea as a
calm. A gale of wind, even a hurricane, with its life, its
energy, its fury, though it may bring the conviction of danger,
is preferred by an old sailor to the dull, listless monotony of a
calm.

These slow movements in the "horse latitudes" were not
distasteful to me. A calm furnished abundant food for curiosity.
The immense fields of gulf-weed, with their parasitical
inhabitants, that we now began to fall in with; the stately
species of nautilus, known as he Portuguese man-of-war, floating
so gracefully, with its transparent body and delicate tints; and
the varieties of fish occasionally seen, including the flying-
fish, dolphin, boneta, and shark, all furnish to an inquiring
mind subjects of deep and abiding interest. My wonder was also
excited by the singularly glassy smoothness of the surface of the
water in a dead calm, while at the same time the long, rolling
waves, or "seas," kept the brig in perpetual motion, and swept