I turned
from them in contempt, and, gazing upward at the earth so lately left,
and left perhaps for ever, beheld it like a huge, dull, copper shield,
about two degrees in diameter, fixed immovably in the heavens
overhead, and tipped on one of its edges with a crescent border of the
most brilliant gold. No traces of land or water could be discovered,
and the whole was clouded with variable spots, and belted with
tropical and equatorial zones.
Thus, may it please your Excellencies, after a series of great
anxieties, unheard of dangers, and unparalleled escapes, I had, at
length, on the nineteenth day of my departure from Rotterdam,
arrived in safety at the conclusion of a voyage undoubtedly the most
extraordinary, and the most momentous, ever accomplished,
undertaken, or conceived by any denizen of earth. But my adventures
yet remain to be related. And indeed your Excellencies may well
imagine that, after a residence of five years upon a planet not only
deeply interesting in its own peculiar character, but rendered
doubly so by its intimate connection, in capacity of satellite, with
the world inhabited by man, I may have intelligence for the private
ear of the States' College of Astronomers of far more importance
than the details, however wonderful, of the mere voyage which so
happily concluded.
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