Excerpt from Under a Tropical Sky: A Journal of First Impressions of the West Indies On Tuesday, the 17th of December 1872, the Royal Mail steamship Tasmanian, after goodbyes had been said, and all the mail-bags had been put on board, was ignominiously pulled round by the little steam-tug tender, and steamed off down Southampton Water, right into a dark bank of leaden clouds, behind which the sun had now sunk. It was the fifty-ninth time that her bows had pointed across the wide Atlantic towards the West Indies. It was my first voyage in an ocean-going steamer, and consequently all was new to me on board. As the tender steamed back to Southampton, handkerchiefs were waved, until at last the increasing distance prevented even those white flags of friendship from being seen, and we had indeed said goodbye to old England, and all that it contained near and dear to us. The first thing to be done is to describe the ship and the mode of life of those on board. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.