He and I and Peterkin afterwards became the best and stanchest friends that ever tossed together on the stormy waves.
I shall say little about the first part of our voyage.

We had the usual amount of rough weather and calm; also we saw many strange fish rolling in the sea, and I was greatly delighted one day by seeing a shoal of flying fish dart out of the water and skim through the air about a foot above the surface.

They were pursued by dolphins, which feed on them, and one flying-fish in its terror flew over the ship, struck on the rigging, and fell upon the deck.

Its wings were just fins elongated, and we found that they could never fly far at a time, and never mounted into the air like birds, but skimmed along the surface of the sea.

Jack and I had it for dinner, and found it remarkably good.
When we approached Cape Horn, at the southern extremity of America, the weather became very cold and stormy, and the sailors began to tell stories about the furious gales and the dangers of that terrible cape.
"Cape Horn," said one, "is the most horrible headland I ever doubled.
I've sailed round it twice already, and both times the ship was a'most blow'd out o' the water." "An' I've been round it once," said another, "an' that time the sails were split, and the ropes frozen in the blocks, so that they wouldn't work, and we wos all but lost." "An' I've been round it five times," cried a third, "an' every time wos wuss than another, the gales wos so tree-mendous!" "And I've been round it no times at all," cried Peterkin, with an impudent wink of his eye, "an' _that_ time I wos blow'd inside out!" Nevertheless, we passed the dreaded cape without much rough weather, and, in the course of a few weeks afterwards, were sailing gently, before a warm tropical breeze, over the Pacific Ocean.