water. Portable soup is very good; it has now and then required an airing to prevent it from moulding. Sour crout is as good as ever.
So much for the ship's company: we ourselves are hardly as well off as they. Our live stock consists of seventeen sheep, four or five fowls, as many South Sea hogs, four or five Muscovy ducks, and an English boar and sow with a litter of pigs. In the use of these we are rather Sparing, as the time of our getting a fresh supply is rather precarious. Salt stock we have nothing worth mentioning, except a kind of salt beef and salted cabbage. Our malt liquors have answered extremely well; we have now both small beer and porter upon tap, as good as I ever drank them, especially the latter. The small beer had some art used to make it keep. Our wine I cannot say much for, though I believe it to be good in its nature; we have not had a glass full these many months, I believe chiefly owing to the carelessness or ignorance of the steward.
2nd October. Took Dagysa rostrata, screna, and polyedra; Beroe incrassata and coarctata; Medusa vitrea; Phyllodoce velella, with several other things which are all put in spirits; Diomedea exulans; Procellaria velox, palmipes, latirostris, and longipes; and Nectris fuliginosa.
3rd. In the course of the day several pieces of a new species of seaweed were taken, and one piece of wood covered with striated barnacles (Lepas anscrina).
5th. Two seals passed the ship asleep, and three birds which Mr. Gore calls Port Egmont hens (Larus catarrhactes). He says they are a sure sign of our being near land. They are something larger than a crow; in flight much like one, flapping their wings often with a slow motion. Their bodies and wings are of a dark chocolate or soot colour; under each wing is a small broadish bar of a dirty white, which makes them so remarkable that it is hardly possible to mistake them. They are seen, as he says, all along the coast of South America and the Falkland Isles. I myself remember to have seen them at Terra del Fuego, but by some accident did not note them down.
