The wind continued very moderate, with fine weather, till the 23d, when it freshened from the N.E. by E., and increased to a strong gale, which split some of our old sails, and made the running rigging very frequently give way. This gale lasted twelve hours; it then became more moderate, and continued so till the 25th at noon, when we entirely lost it, and had only a very light air.
On the 26th, in the morning, we thought we saw land to the W.S.W.; but, after running about sixteen leagues in that direction, we found our mistake; and night coming on, we again steered W. Our latitude, at this time, was 19° 45', which was the greatest southing we made in this run; our longitude was 183°, and variation 12° 45' E. We continued in this course, with little alteration in the wind, till the 29th, when it shifted to the S.E. and S.S.E., and, for a few hours in the night, it was in the W.; the weather being dark and cloudy, with much rain. We had met, for some days past, several turtles, one of which was the smallest I ever saw, not exceeding three inches in length. We were also accompanied by man-of-war birds, and boobies of an unusual kind, being quite white, except the tip of the wing, which was black, and easily mistaken, at first sight, for gannets.
The light winds which we had met with for some time past, with the present unsettled state of the weather, and the little appearance of any change for the better, induced Captain Clerke to alter his plan of keeping within the tropical latitudes; and accordingly, at six this evening, we began to steer N.W. by N., at which time our latitude was 20° 23', and our longitude 180° 40'. During the continuance of the light winds, which prevailed almost constantly ever since our departure from the Sandwich Islands, the weather was very close, and the air hot and sultry; the thermometer being generally at 80°, and sometimes at 83°. All this time we had a considerable swell from the N.E.; and in no period of the voyage did the ships roll and strain so violently.
In the morning of the 1st of April, the wind changed from the S.E. to the N.E. by E., and blew a fresh breeze till the morning of the 4th, when it altered two points more to the E., and by noon increased to a strong gale, which lasted till the afternoon of the 5th, attended with hazy weather. It then again altered its direction to the S.E., became more moderate, and was accompanied by heavy showers of rain. During all this time, we kept steering to the N.W. against a slow, but regular current from that quarter, which caused a constant variation from our reckoning by the log, of fifteen miles a day. On the 4th, being then in the latitude 26° 17', and longitude 173° 30', we passed prodigious quantities of what sailors call Portuguese men-of-war (_holothuria physalis_), and were also accompanied with a great number of sea-birds, amongst which we observed, for the first time, the albatross and sheerwater.