The author, who had the command of His Majesty’s ship Algerine, was instructed to take charge of the enterprise commenced by the officers and crew of His Majesty’s ship Lightning, having for its object the recovery of the treasure and stores from the wreck of the Thetis, which, in the month of December 1830, had sunk in a cove to the south-east of Cape Frio. He reached this spot on the 6th of March, 1832, having with him eleven officers and eighty-five men. A certain number of men were appointed to remain on board the ship, which was moored in a harbour two miles off a party of artificers and others were employed at the huts which they inhabited near the Cape; and the rest, nearly thirty-five in number, were stationed at the wreck. The author gives a description of Cape Frio, and of the island of which it forms the south-eastern extremity, and which is an immense promontory of insulated granite jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, sixty miles east of Rio de Janeiro. The cove, in the middle of which the wreck of the Thetis lay, is a square indenture in the cliffs, six hundred feet deep by as many wide. It is surrounded by nearly perpendicular masses of granite, from one hundred to two hundred feet high, and is exposed to the whole swell of the South Atlantic, which sets in with remarkable force in that direction. The weather is singularly variable; and transitions frequently take place in the course of few hours, from perfect stillness to the most tremendous swell. The author states that he has witnessed few scenes in nature more sublime than that presented by the Thetis Cove during a gale of wind from the south-west.
The physical and chemical oceanography of the waters bathing the continental slope of the Celtic Sea
