From Madeira the Luso makes, once a month, the tour of the Azores, touching at each island–a great convenience–and returning in ten days.
Early on Thursday, the 22nd, the lumpy, churning sea began to subside, and the invisible balm seduced all the sufferers to the quarter-deck. They were wild to sight Madeira as children to see the rising of the pantomime-curtain. There was not much to gaze at; but what will not attract man’s stare at sea?–a gull, a turtle, a flying fish! By the by, Captain Tuckey, of the Congo Expedition, remarked the ’extraordinary absence of sea-birds in the vicinity of Madeira and the Canaries:’ they have since learned the way thither. Porto Santo appeared as a purple lump of three knobs, a manner of ’gizzard island,’ backed by a deeper gloom of clouds–Madeira. Then it lit up with a pale glimmer as of snow, the effect of the sun glancing upon the thin greens of the northern flank; and, lastly, it broke into two masses–northern and southern–of peaks and precipices connected by a strip of lowland.