Excerpt from Between the Andes and the Ocean It would be a great thing for the Mississippi Valley to have a line of steamers from New Orleans to the isthmus. Most of the freight in the hold of the good ship Finance that brought us down originated west of the Allegheny mountains. It should have gone to its market on longitudinal lines. The voyage from New York is delightful. People always expect a little weather Off Cape Hatteras, but the captain of our ship said that was a popular delusion. He declared that Hatteras has no more storms than any other point on the earth's surface. The land projects into the Atlantic and makes nasty sailing along that coast in bad weather, and there have been terrible disasters from time to time; therefore, Captain Sukeforth says that Cape Hatteras has unjustly got a bad name. He has been sailing this course for a number Of years - I have forgotten how many - and declares that he has never met with a gale in the latitude of Hatteras. The severe weather of Hatteras is also due to the fact that it lies in the track of what are called the southwest storms; that is, storms that advance from the southwest and move northeastward. They are called northeasters on the Atlantic coast and are the severest Of storms. Hatteras is in their direct path, just as Chicago is in the direct path of storms that advance from the West, and very near the path of all the storms that come down from the northwest. Taking the wind velocity for a month, Chicago exceeds Hatteras by about miles. 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.