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do but spend our time on shore for two days. We amused ourselves trying to shoot fish, but seldom hit any.
There I tasted monkey meat, which is considered a great treat by the Indians. It was perfectly white and, when it was scalded and scraped like a pig, it looked exactly like a little child, but it tasted good.
I saw also two white Indians, a woman and child. They were milk white -white hair and eyelashes, and no color whatever in their cheeks. They were born white. In St. Croix I have also seen a white Negro and several spotted ones, but sickness was the cause of their condition.
I shot several parrots. They were here in amazing flocks, and they tasted fine. After five months on that coast we started from St. Bias in the middle of December.	We intended to go south of Cuba to get	the Gulf Stream with	us.	But
when we reached it we had a north-easterly storm	with a most fearful	sea.	We
were driven far into the Gulf of Mexico. The vessel sprang a leak, so we resolved to put in at New Orleans instead of Baltimore.
The	third day the weather calmed a little,	so the captain and	the	boys
took all	the parrots and monkeys, of which we had	many, on deck so their cages
could be cleaned. We were all standing in the stern eating breakfast, for down in the cabin we could not go, as the water was high in the ship. We had been on deck since the storm began.
We thought the sea was calming, but we were sadly mistaken, for, as we stood merrily eating, a fearful sea came and threw the vessel over on one side so that everything on deck went overboard. We clung on, but when the ship was righted, we saw the poor monkeys and parrots swimming around in their cages.
Fortunately another sea did not come immediately or the ship would certainly have foundered. Prepared for the worst, we fastened an ax so we could, at a moment's notice, chop the masts overboard. To ease the ship the topsail mast had to be taken down. It fell to my lot to do this, and never have I had a harder piece of work. It was almost impossible to hold fast, and, as I had my shirt sleeves rolled up, there was hardly any skin left on my arms when I came down.
After the weather got better and we had patched the ship up a little we saw land one morning. We got a pilot on board and ran in and anchored by a little town lying at the mouth of the Mississippi.
The country here is very flat. The river has many mouths, and is difficult to navigate. It changes its channel often. In the spring the bottom is only soft mud.
The day after, a steamship came and towed us up to New Orleans in a day and a half against a five or six mile current. It is one hundred and seventy miles up the river. At the mouth of the river is about one and a half English miles and it keeps the same width up to St. Anthony's Falls.
The first fifty or sixty miles are very low, and nothing but marsh, but higher up there are many sugar plantations protected against the water by levees. Here grow many oak and cypress trees covered by a peculiar long gray moss which is called "Spanish Beard". It is used for mattresses instead of curly hair. It is often eight feet long and gives the trees a strange look.
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