tons, the Merchant Royal, was in charge of Samuel Foxcroft. It will thus be seen that the united tonnage of this fleet, as it was grandiloquently called, did not exceed that registered for a good sized pleasure yacht of our day.
The expedition sailed from Plymouth on April 10, 1591, touched at the Canary Islands about a month later, and in August dropped anchor off Saldania, in the modern Table Bay. Although the voyage had thus far not been an unduly protracted one "the disease of the sea," the terrible scurvy, had worked havoc amongst the crew. The ravages of the malady were so great that Raymond decided to send back the Merchant Royal with the worst of the sick cases in order that his further operations might not be hampered, and the safety of the fleet possibly imperilled by the presence of these miserable human wrecks in his vessels. The voyage was resumed by the Penelope and the Edward Bonaventure on September 8. The Cape was doubled on the following day, and almost immediately the ships fell in with one of those hurricanes which have given unenviable distinction to the great South African promontory in the annals of navigation.
In the whole range of natural phenomena there is, perhaps, nothing more awe-inspiring than one of these Atlantic tempests. Immense waves fifty or sixty feet high, whose white tip of foam accentuates their inky blackness, sweep in majestic grandeur along, conveying in their irresistible might a sense of power which seems to reduce to absolute nothingness the puny human efforts to avert the calamity which each mountainous mass of water appears to threaten. The sky overhead, thick with sombre masses of cloud, is gashed with great streaks of lightning which, playing about the masts of the labouring ship, form from time to time balls
