The next morning we could plainly
distinguish, though at a great distance, the vapors hanging over
the Cape and the headlands which bound False, or St. Simon’s
Bay, on the east. Towards noon they were lifted by the sun,and the far, faint, blue outline of Table Mountain, with that
of the four or five broken peaks forming the Cape, was distinctly
They were so precisely similar to the pictures
I had seen, and to that in my imagination, that I recognized
them at once, with a feeling of familiar acquaintance. They
slowly passed astern, and at four o’clock faded out of sight
behind us. And so farewell, savage old Africa! Shall I ever
see your shores again?
Now, at last, I felt that our prow was turned homewards—
that our keel ploughed the Atlantic, and the old far-off Asian
world lay behind me. We were again sailing for the North
Star, for the hemisphere where the strong heart of the world
beats, and will beat for ever ! We were on our own side of the
globe, and I felt—what I had not before felt, since leaving
China—that every day was bringing me nearer home. The
very sky was changed; the sea was of a deeper blue; the waves
danced and sparkled with a merrier life; the clouds gathered
into larger masses and grouped themselves together with a sense
of power, no longer like the slumberous vapors of the East,
smouldering languidly away, in the fires of the sun. There
was a prophecy of America in the very air, and I invoked a
threefold benediction on the cold south-wind, which filled every
inch of our towering piles of canvas, and carried us through the
night at twelve knots an hour, dashing the ocean into phosphoric
foam.