five o'clock in the evening
Nothing on the horizon , till about four o'clock a steamer running west on our counter . Her masts were visible for an instant , but she could not see the Nautilus , being too low in the water . I fancied this steamboat belonged to the P.O. Company , which runs from Ceylon to Sydney , touching at King George 's Point and Melbourne . At five o'clock in the evening , before that fleeting twilight which binds night to day in tropical zones , Conseil and I were astonished by a curious spectacle . It was a shoal of argonauts travelling along on the surface of the ocean . We could count several hundreds . They belonged to the tubercle kind which are peculiar to the Indian seas .