Prayer Meeting in the chapel

Monday Aug 25th



A fine breezy day with the wind as dead against us as could be wished by our deadliest enemies, if any of us have such. We are all heartily sick of sighting Old England. When I turned out this morning we appeared to be close in shore could see fields & hedges quite clearly & 13 days out of London still only 4 or 5 hours distant from there. They say we have rather lost than gained ground since yesterday. This afternoon we see the Cornish coast again and now we are just going to bout ship again. They have just lowered the staysail in preparation for that event & did so without warning the passengers, the consequence was the big heavy sail came down with a run on to a group of men women & children to their great alarm. The captain saw the circumstance & blew up the man who let the sail go. It is very interesting to watch the ship turned about. They first drop any intervening staysails & furl the mainsail so as to clear all obstruction and then on the Captains word of command, all the necessary ropes being unfastened, the sailors let go & the whole of the sails (except I believe top sails) of both main & mizzen masts whirl half way round so as to catch the wind on the contrary side of the sails, the ship then steadies wonderfully no matter how it is blowing, for the sails of two masts catch the wind one way & those on the other mast the other way. The yards of the foremast are then pulled round to correspond with the others & away we go in quite an opposite direction. There was a sort of prayer meeting in the Intermediate cabin last night. I was not able to go, as baby required all my attention. Afterwards we had about an hours singing in our cabin, the steward leading with his violin. This morning we all got up pretty well, but this evening Lizzie is in bed sick & I feel much like it, we are rolling about as if the ship would turn bottom up. This afternoon we passed two Men of War, Dutch ships it was thought they were. They were going up channel & the beastly wind which is so hindering us was entirely in their favour, and they had all sail out & I thought were really a splendid sight with every inch of canvas spread & stunsails [note: variant of "studdingsails"] too. They looked like huge birds floating gracefully along. Our 2nd Mate asked me if they did not look lubberly perhaps to a sailor they did, but not to my unaccustomed eyes. This evening the wind has got up again & we are rolling frightfully. During tea all the things were pitched on the floor, it was well they were mostly metal or they would have been smashed to smithereens.