To Cuba and Back by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Thursday, February 17. -- Again a beautiful, warm day. I wake, and the first glance out of my stateroom window shows the sea and sky flushed with the red of a bright sunrise. Awnings are spread; straw-hats and linen coats are worn; sewing, reading, and chess-playing is going on among the elders and the children are romping about the decks, beginning to feel entirely at home. There are boys from the Northern States, with fair skins and light hair, strong, loud-voiced, plainly dressed, in stout shoes, honest and awkward; and there are Cuban boys, with a mixed air of the passionate and the timorous, sallow, slender, small-voiced, graceful, but with the grace rather of girls than of boys, wearing slippers, ornamented waistcoats and jackets and hats with broad bands of cord. What preternaturally black eyes those little Creole girls have! Are they really eyes, so out of proportion in size and effect to their small thin faces? Their mother is hale and full fleshed, and probably they will come to the same favour at last.

Throughout the day, sailing down the outer edge of the Gulf Stream, we see vessels of all forms and sizes, coming in sight and passing away, as in a dioramic show. There is a heavy cotton droger from the Gulf, of 1200 tons burden, under a cloud of sail, pressing on to the northern seas of New England or Old England. Here comes a saucy little Baltimore brig, close-hauled and leaning over to it; and there, half down in the horizon, is a pile of white canvas, which the experienced eyes of my two friends, the passenger shipmasters, pronounce to be a bark, outward bound. Every passenger says to every other, how beautiful! how exquisite! That pale thin girl who is going to Cuba for her health, her brother travelling with her, sits on the settee, propped by a pillow, and tries to smile and to think she feels stronger in this air. She says she shall stay in Cuba until she gets well!