NUMBER FIVE.
| Steamship America, | 
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| Thanksgiving Day, Nov, 24, 1870. | 
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| Lat. 32, 55., Lon. 112, 57. | 
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Our third and last Sunday on the America was a very pleasant one. We had on board three missionaries who were returning with their families after a brief absence to the scenes of their labors—one to Yokohama, one to China, and the other to India. As usual, we had religious services in the main saloon in the morning, and in the evening Rev. Dr. Scudder gave us a very interesting lecture on India. The weather was delightful, a bright sun and a cloudless sky, the sea as smooth as an inland lake, and the air as warm as a September day at home. In four days more we expected to sight Japan. But, as our Scotch friends say, “The best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agloe.”
On Monday night we were within eight hundred miles of Yokohama, in the edge of that current of warm water which corresponds with the “Gulf Stream” of the Atlantic—here as there the fruitful source of typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes. This current, which is supposed by some savans to have its origin in submarine volcanoes south of the Island of Formosa, sweeps thence along the coast of Japan, through the North Pacific to the Aleutian Islands, then over to the coast of California, down which it follows until lost in the warm seas about the equator. The day had been warm and sultry, with occasional showers, but the barometer had indicated no storm brewing, until at ten o’clock it dropped in forty minutes from 29.80 to 28.68. So sudden a fall boded us no good, and our vigilant captain at once prepared for one of those
