                               The Encantadas
                                     or
                              Enchanted Isles
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                                Sketch First
                             The Isles at Large

-- "That may not be, said then the ferryman,
Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne;
For those same islands seeming now and than,
Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne,
But stragling plots which to and fro do ronne
In the wide waters; therefore are they hight
The Wandering Islands; therefore do them shonne;
For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight
Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight;
For whosoever once hath fastened
His foot thereon may never it secure
But wandreth evermore uncertain and unsure."

"Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave,
That still for carrion carcasses doth crave;
On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl,
Shrieking his baleful note, which ever drave
Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl,
And all about it wandring ghosts did wayle and howl."

Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside
city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot
the sea, and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the
Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of
isles, looking much as the world at large might after a penal
conflagration.

It is to be doubted whether any spot on earth can, in desolateness, furnish
a parallel to this group. Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, old cities by
piecemeal tumbling to their ruin, these are melancholy enough; but, like
all else which has but once been associated with humanity, they still
awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad. Hence, even the Dead
Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times inspire, does not
fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less unpleasurable feelings.

And as for solitariness, the great forests of the north, the expanses of
unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice fields, are the profoundest of
solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides
and seasons mitigates their terror, because, though unvisited by men, those
forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar stars
even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day, the
irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.

But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which
exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is that to them change
never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by the
Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while, already
reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them.
The showers refresh the deserts, but in these isles rain never falls. Like
split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an
everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. "Have mercy upon me," the wailing
spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, "and send Lazarus that he may dip
the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in
this flame."

Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. It is
deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow that the jackal should den in
the wastes of weedy Babylon, but the Encantadas refuse to harbor even the
outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile
life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that
strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the iguana. No voice, no low, no
howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is more
ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry bushes,
without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep fissures of
calcined rock and treacherously masking them, or a parched growth of
distorted cactus trees.

In many places the coast is rock-bound, or, more properly, clinker-bound;
tumbled masses of blackish or greenish stuff like the dross of an iron
furnace, forming dark clefts and caves here and there, into which a
ceaseless sea pours a fury of foam, overhanging them with a swirl of gray,
haggard mist, amidst which sail screaming flights of unearthly birds
heightening the dismal din. However calm the sea without, there is no rest
for these swells and those rocks; they lash and are lashed, even when the
outer ocean is most at peace with itself. On the oppressive, clouded days,
such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator, the dark,
vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and
breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most
Plutonian sight. In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist.

Those parts of the strand free from the marks of fire stretch away in wide
level beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with here and there decayed
bits of sugar cane, bamboos, and coconuts, washed upon this other and
darker world from the charming palm isles to the westward and southward,
all the way from Paradise to Tartarus, while mixed with the relics of
distant beauty you will sometimes see fragments of charred wood and
moldering ribs of wrecks. Neither will anyone be surprised at meeting these
last, after observing the conflicting currents which eddy throughout nearly
all the wide channels of the entire group. The capriciousness of the tides
of air sympathizes with those of the sea. Nowhere is the wind so light,
baffling, and every way unreliable, and so given to perplexing calms, as at
the Encantadas. Nigh a month has been spent by a ship going from one isle
to another, though but ninety miles between; for owing to the force of the
current, the boats employed to tow barely suffice to keep the craft from
sweeping upon the cliffs, but do nothing towards accelerating her voyage.
Sometimes it is impossible for a vessel from afar to fetch up with the
group itself, unless large allowances for prospective leeway have been made
ere its coming in sight. And yet, at other times, there is a mysterious
indraft, which irresistibly draws a passing vessel among the isles, though
not bound to them.

True, at one period, as to some extent at the present day, large fleets of
whalemen cruised for spermaceti upon what some seamen call the Enchanted
Ground. But this, as in due place will be described, was off the great
outer isle of Albemarle away from the intricacies of the smaller isles,
where there is plenty of sea room, and hence to that vicinity the above
remarks do not altogether apply, though even there the current runs at
times with singular force, shifting, too, with as singular a caprice.

Indeed, there are seasons when currents quite unaccountable prevail for a
great distance round about the total group, and are so strong and irregular
as to change a vessel's course against the helm, though sailing at the rate
of four or five miles the hour. The difference in the reckonings of
navigators produced by these causes, along with the light and variable
winds, long nourished a persuasion that there existed two distinct clusters
of isles in the parallel of the Encantadas, about a hundred leagues apart.
Such was the idea of their earlier visitors, the Buccaneers; and as late as
1750 the charts of that part of the Pacific accorded with the strange
delusion. And this apparent fleetingness and unreality of the locality of
the isles was most probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the
Encantada, or Enchanted Group.

But not uninfluenced by their character, as they now confessedly exist, the
modern voyager will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal of this name
might have in part originated in that air of spellbound desertness which so
significantly invests the isles. Nothing can better suggest the aspect of
once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into ashes. Apples of
Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, they
themselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same:
fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death.

Nor would the appellation "enchanted" seem misapplied in still another
sense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these wilds --
whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name, Gallipagos --
concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long cherished a
superstition not more frightful than grotesque. They earnestly believe that
all wicked sea officers, more especially commodores and captains, are at
death (and in some cases before death) transformed into tortoises,
thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities, sole solitary lords of
Asphaltum.

Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought was originally inspired by the
woebegone landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps, by the
tortoises. For, apart from their strictly physical features, there is
something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures.
Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form so suppliantly
expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful longevity does
not fail to enhance the impression.

Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of absurdly believing in
enchantments can I restrain the admission that sometimes, even now, when
leaving the crowded city to wander out July and August among the Adirondack
Mountains, far from the influences of towns and proportionally nigh to the
mysterious ones of nature; when at such times I sit me down in the mossy
head of some deep-wooded gorge, surrounded by prostrate trunks of blasted
pines, and recall, as in a dream, my other and far-distant rovings in the
baked heart of the charmed isles, and remember the sudden glimpses of dusky
shells, and long languid necks protruded from the leafless thickets; and
again have beheld the vitreous inland rocks worn down and grooved into deep
ruts by ages and ages of the slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools
of scanty water; I can hardly resist the feeling that in my time I have
indeed slept upon evilly enchanted ground.

Nay, such is the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy, that I
know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical delusion
concerning the Gallipagos. For, often in scenes of social merriment, and
especially at revels held by candlelight in old-fashioned mansions, so that
shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an angular and spacious
room, making them put on a look of haunted undergrowth of lonely woods, I
have drawn the attention of my comrades by my fixed gaze and sudden change
of air, as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging from those imagined
solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic
tortoise, with " Memento * * * * * " burning in live letters upon his back.
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                               Sketch Second
                          Two Sides to a Tortoise

"Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,
Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects
From her most cunning hand escaped bee;
All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee.
Ne wonder if these do a man appall;
For all that here at home we dreadful1 hold
Be but as bugs to fearen babes withall
Compared to the creatures in these isles' entrall.

Fear naught, then said the palmer, well avized,
For these same monsters are not there indeed,
But are into these fearful shapes disguized.

And lifting up his vertuous staffe on high,
Then all that dreadful armie fast gan flye
Into great Tethy's bosom, where they hidden lye."

In view of the description given, may one be gay upon the Encantadas? Yes:
that is, find one the gaiety, and he will be gay. And, indeed, sackcloth
and ashes as they are, the isles are not perhaps unmitigated gloom. For
while no spectator can deny their claims to a most solemn and superstitious
consideration, no more than my firmest resolutions can decline to behold
the specter-tortoise when emerging from its shadowy recess; yet even the
tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the back, still possesses a
bright side; its calipee or breastplate being sometimes of a faint
yellowish or golden tinge. Moreover, everyone knows that tortoises as well
as turtle are of such a make that if you but put them on their backs you
thereby expose their bright sides without the possibility of their
recovering themselves, and turning into view the other. But after you have
done this, and because you have done this, you should not swear that the
tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright, keep it turned up perpetually
if you can, but be honest, and don't deny the black. Neither should he who
cannot turn the tortoise from its natural position so as to hide the darker
and expose his livelier aspect, like a great October pumpkin in the sun,
for that cause declare the creature to be one total inky blot. The tortoise
is both black and bright. But let us to particulars.

Some months before my first stepping ashore upon the group, my ship was
cruising in its close vicinity. One noon we found ourselves off the South
Head of Albemarle, and not very far from the land. Partly by way of freak,
and partly by way of spying out so strange a country, a boat's crew was
sent ashore, with orders to see all they could, and, besides, bring back
whatever tortoises they could conveniently transport.

It was after sunset when the adventurers returned. I looked down over the
ship's high side as if looking down over the curb of a well, and dimly saw
the damp boat deep in the sea with some unwonted weight. Ropes were dropped
over, and presently three huge antediluvian-looking tortoises, after much
straining, were landed on deck. They seemed hardly of the seed of earth. We
had been broad upon the waters for five long months, a period amply
sufficient to make all things of the land wear a fabulous hue to the dreamy
mind. Had three Spanish custom-house officers boarded us then it is not
unlikely that I should have curiously stared at them, felt of them, and
stroked them, much as savages serve civilized guests. But instead of three
custom-house officers, behold these really wondrous tortoises -- none of
your schoolboy mud turtles, but black as widower's weeds, heavy as chests
of plate, with vast shells medallioned and orbed like shields, and dented
and blistered like shields that have breasted a battle, shaggy, too, here
and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with the spray of the sea. These
mystic creatures, suddenly translated by night from unutterable solitudes
to our peopled deck, affected me in a manner not easy to unfold. They
seemed newly crawled forth from beneath the foundations of the world. Yea,
they seemed the identical tortoises whereon the Hindu plants this total
sphere. With a lantern I inspected them more closely. Such worshipful
venerableness of aspect! Such furry greenness mantling the rude peelings
and healing the fissures of their shattered shells. I no more saw three
tortoises. They expanded -- became transfigured. I seemed to see three
Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay.

Ye oldest inhabitants of this or any other isle, said I, pray, give me the
freedom of your three-walled towns.

The great feeling inspired by these creatures was that of age: dateless,
indefinite endurance. And in fact that any other creature can live and
breathe as long as the tortoise of the Encantadas, I will not readily
believe. Not to hint of their known capacity of sustaining life while going
without food for an entire year, consider that impregnable armor of their
living mail. What other bodily being possesses such a citadel wherein to
resist the assaults of Time?

As, lantern in hand, I scraped among the moss and beheld the ancient scars
of bruises received in many a sullen fall among the marly mountains of the
isle -- scars strangely widened, swollen, half obliterate, and yet
distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of very hoary trees, I
seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the bird tracks and ciphers
upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible creatures whose very ghosts are
now defunct.

As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow weary
draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck. Their
stupidity or their resolution was so great that they never went aside for
any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just before the
mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering ram against the
immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to
force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a
penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical, enchanter, seems in
nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which
so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings ram
themselves heroically against rocks, and long abide there, nudging,
wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their
inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to
straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Meeting with no such hindrance as their companion did, the other tortoises
merely fell foul of small stumbling blocks -- buckets, blocks, and coils of
rigging -- and at times in the act of crawling over them would slip with an
astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and
concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came: an isle full
of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of
splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable
thickets. I then pictured these three straightforward monsters, century
after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling
so slowly and ponderously that not only did toadstools and all fungus
things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs.
With them I lost myself in volcanic mazes, brushed away endless boughs of
rotting thickets, till finally in a dream I found myself sitting
cross-legged upon the foremost, a Brahmin similarly mounted upon either
side, forming a tripod of foreheads which upheld the universal cope.

Such was the wild nightmare begot by my first impression of the Encantadas
tortoise. But next evening, strange to say, I sat down with my shipmates
and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks and tortoise stews; and,
supper over, out knife, and helped convert the three mighty concave shells
into three fanciful soup tureens, and polished the three flat yellowish
calipees into three gorgeous salvers.
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                                Sketch Third
                                Rock Rodondo

"For they this hight the Rock of vile Reproach,
A dangerous and dreadful place,
To which nor fish nor fowl did once approach,
But yelling meaws with sea-gulls hoars and bace
And cormoyrants with birds of ravenous race,
Which still sit waiting on that dreadful clift."

"With that the rolling sea resounding soft
In his big base them fitly answered,
And on the Rock, the waves breaking aloft,
A solemn meane unto them measured."

"Then he the boteman bad row easily,
And let him heare some part of that rare melody."

"Suddeinly an innumerable flight
Of harmefull fowles about them fluttering cride, And with their wicked
wings them oft did smight
And sore annoyed, groping in that griesly night."

"Even all the nation of unfortunate
And fatal birds about them flocked were."

To go up into a high stone tower is not only a very fine thing in itself,
but the very best mode of gaining a comprehensive view of the region round
about. It is all the better if this tower stand solitary and alone, like
that mysterious Newport one, or else be sole survivor of some perished
castle.

Now, with reference to the Enchanted Isles, we are fortunately supplied
with just such a noble point of observation in a remarkable rock, from its
peculiar figure called of old by the Spaniards, Rock Rodondo, or Round
Rock. Some two hundred and fifty feet high, rising straight from the sea
ten miles from land, with the whole mountainous group to the south and
east, Rock Rodondo occupies, on a large scale, very much the position which
the famous Campanile or detached Bell Tower of St. Mark does with respect
to the tangled group of hoary edifices around it.

Ere ascending, however, to gaze abroad upon the Encantadas, this sea tower
itself claims attention. It is visible at the distance of thirty miles,
and, fully participating in that enchantment which pervades the group, when
first seen afar invariably is mistaken for a sail. Four leagues away, of a
golden, hazy noon, it seems some Spanish admiral's ship, stacked up with
glittering canvas. Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail ho! from all three masts. But
coming nigh, the enchanted frigate is transformed apace into a craggy keep.

My first visit to the spot was made in the gray of the morning. With a view
of fishing, we had lowered three boats, and, pulling some two miles from
our vessel, found ourselves just before dawn of day close under the
moonshadow of Rodondo. Its aspect was heightened, and yet softened, by the
strange double twilight of the hour. The great full moon burnt in the low
west like a half-spent beacon, casting a soft mellow tinge upon the sea
like that cast by a waning fire of embers upon a midnight hearth; while
along the entire east the invisible sun sent pallid intimations of his
coming. The wind was light, the waves languid; the stars twinkled with a
faint effulgence; all nature seemed supine with the long night-watch, and
half-suspended in jaded expectation of the sun. This was the critical hour
to catch Rodondo in his perfect mood. The twilight was just enough to
reveal every striking point, without tearing away the dim investiture of
wonder.

From a broken, stairlike base, washed as the steps of a water palace by the
waves, the tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven summit. These
uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most peculiar feature. For
at their lines of junction they project flatly into encircling shelves,
from top to bottom, rising one above another in graduated series. And as
the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive with swallows, so were all
these rocky ledges with unnumbered seafowl. Eaves upon eaves, and nests
upon nests. Here and there were long birdlime streaks of a ghostly white
staining the tower from sea to air, readily accounting for its saillike
look afar. All would have been bewitchingly quiescent were it not for the
demoniac din created by the birds. Not only were the eaves rustling with
them, but they flew densely overhead, spreading themselves into a winged
and continually shifting canopy. The tower is the resort of aquatic birds
for hundreds of leagues around. To the north, to the east, to the west,
stretches nothing but eternal ocean; so that the man-of-war hawk coming
from the coasts of North America, Polynesia, or Peru, makes his first land
at Rodondo. And yet, though Rodondo be terra firma, no land bird ever
lighted on it. Fancy a red robin or a canary there! What a falling into the
hands of the Philistines when the poor warbler should be surrounded by such
locust-flights of strong bandit birds, with long bills cruel as daggers.

I know not where one can better study the natural history of strange
seafowl than at Rodondo. It is the aviary of Ocean. Birds light here which
never touched mast or tree; hermit-birds, which ever fly alone;
cloud-birds, familiar with unpierced zones of air.

Let us first glance low down to the lowermost shelf of all, which is the
widest, too, and but a little space from high-water mark. What outlandish
beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical, they stand all
round the rock like sculptured caryatides, supporting the next range of
eaves above. Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen, their bills short,
their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their sides are neither
fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin;
as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent; without exception
the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered by man. Though
dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental
claims to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it
sculls; in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps
this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of
Magellan, and on the abased sea-story of Rodondo.

But look, what are yon woebegone regiments drawn up on the next shelf
above? what rank and file of large strange fowl? what sea Friars of Orders
Gray? Pelicans. Their elongated bills, and heavy leathern pouches suspended
thereto, give them the most lugubrious expression. A pensive race, they
stand for hours together without motion. Their dull, ashy plumage imparts
an aspect as if they had been powdered over with cinders. A penitential
bird, indeed, fitly haunting the shores of the clinkered Encantadas,
whereon tormented Job himself might have well sat down and scraped himself
with potsherds.

Higher up now we mark the gony, or gray albatross, anomalously so called,
an unsightly, unpoetic bird, unlike its storied kinsman, which is the
snow-white ghost of the haunted Capes of Hope and Horn.

As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower
serially disposed in order of their magnitude: gannets, black and speckled
haglets, jays, sea hens, sperm-whale birds, gulls of all varieties --
thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial
array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly in a great
piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary's chicken sounds his
continual challenge and alarm. That this mysterious hummingbird of ocean --
which, had it but brilliancy of hue, might, from its evanescent liveliness,
be almost called its butterfly, yet whose chirrup under the stern is
ominous to mariners as to the peasant the deathtick sounding from behind
the chimney jamb -- should have its special haunt at the Encantadas,
contributes, in the seaman's mind. not a little to their dreary spell.

As day advances the dissonant din augments. With ear-splitting cries the
wild birds celebrate their matins. Each moment, flights push from the tower
and join the aerial choir hovering overhead, while their places below are
supplied by darting myriads. But down through all this discord of commotion
I hear clear, silver, buglelike notes unbrokenly falling, like oblique
lines of swift-slanting rain in a cascading shower. I gaze far up, and
behold a snowwhite angelic thing with one long, lancelike feather thrust
out behind. It is the bright, inspiriting chanticleer of ocean, the
beauteous bird, from its bestirring whistle of musical invocation fitly
styled the "boatswain's mate."

The winged, life-clouding Rodondo had its full counterpart in the finny
hosts which people the waters at its base. Below the water line, the rock
seemed one honeycomb of grottoes, affording labyrinthine lurking places for
swarms of fairy fish. All were strange, many exceedingly beautiful, and
would have well graced the costliest glass globes in which goldfish are
kept for a show. Nothing was more striking than the complete novelty of
many individuals of this multitude. Here hues were seen as yet unpainted,
and figures which are unengraved.

To show the multitude, avidity, and nameless fearlessness and tameness of
these fish, let me say that often, marking through clear spaces of water --
temporarily made so by the concentric dartings of the fish above the
surface -- certain larger and less unwary wights which swam slow and deep,
our anglers would cautiously essay to drop their lines down to these last.
But in vain; there was no passing the uppermost zone. No sooner did the
hook touch the sea, than a hundred infatuates contended for the honor of
capture. Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you are of
the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not
understand, human nature.

But the dawn is now fairly day. Band after band, the seafowl sail away to
forage the deep for their food. The tower is left solitary, save the
fish-caves at its base. Its birdlime gleams in the golden rays like the
whitewash of a tall lighthouse, or the lofty sails of a cruiser. This
moment, doubtless, while we know it to be a dead desert rock, other
voyagers are taking oaths it is a glad populous ship.

But ropes now, and let us ascend. Yet soft, this is not so easy.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                               Sketch Fourth
                        A Pisgah View From the Rock

"That done, he leads him to the highest mount,
From whence, far off he unto him did show:" --

If you seek to ascend Rock Rodondo, take the following prescription. Go
three voyages round the world as a main-royal-man of the tallest frigate
that floats; then serve a year or two apprenticeship to the guides who
conduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe; and as many more respectively
to a rope-dancer, an Indian juggler, and a chamois. This done, come and be
rewarded by the view from our tower. How we get there, we alone know. If we
sought to tell others, what the wiser were they? Suffice it that here at
the summit you and I stand. Does any balloonist, does the outlook man in
the moon, take a broader view of space? Much thus, one fancies, looks the
universe from Milton's celestial battlements. A boundless watery Kentucky.
Here Daniel Boone would have dwelt content.

Never heed for the present yonder Burnt District of the Enchanted Isles.
Look edgeways, as it were, past them, to the south. You see nothing; but
permit me to point out the direction, if not the place, of certain
interesting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower's base, we
behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole.

We stand now ten miles from the Equator. Yonder, to the east some six
hundred miles, lies the continent, this Rock being just about on the
parallel of Quito.

Observe another thing here. We are at one of three uninhabited clusters,
which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main, sentinel, at long
intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In a peculiar
manner, also, they terminate the South American character of country. Of
the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one partakes of the
qualities of the Encantadas or Gallipagos, the isles of St. Felix and St.
Ambrose, the isles Juan Fernandez and Massafuero. Of the first, it needs
not here to speak. The second lie a little above the Southern Tropic,
lofty, inhospitable, and uninhabitable rocks, one of which, presenting two
round hummocks connected by a low reef, exactly resembles a huge
double-headed shot. The last lie in the latitude of 33 degrees, high, wild
and cloven. Juan Fernandez is sufficiently famous without further
description. Massafuero is a Spanish name, expressive of the fact that the
isle so called lies more without, that is, further off the main than its
neighbor Juan. This isle Massafuero has a very imposing aspect at a
distance of eight or ten miles. Approached in one direction, in cloudy
weather, its great overhanging height and rugged contour, and more
especially a peculiar slope of its broad summits, give it much the air of a
vast iceberg drifting in tremendous poise. Its sides are split with dark
cavernous recesses, as an old cathedral with its gloomy lateral chapels.
Drawing nigh one of these gorges from sea, after a long voyage, and
beholding some tatterdemalion outlaw, staff in hand, descending its steep
rocks toward you, conveys a very queer emotion to a lover of the
picturesque.

On fishing parties from ships, at various times, I have chanced to visit
each of these groups. The impression they give to the stranger pulling
close up in his boat under their grim cliffs is that surely he must be
their first discoverer, such, for the most part, is the unimpaired. .
.silence and solitude. And here, by the way, the mode in which these isles
were really first lighted upon by Europeans is not unworthy of mention,
especially as what is about to be said likewise applies to the original
discovery of our Encantadas.

Prior to the year 1563, the voyages made by Spanish ships from Peru to
Chile were full of difficulty. Along this coast, the winds from the south
most generally prevail, and it had been an invariable custom to keep close
in with the land, from a superstitious conceit on the part of the Spaniards
that were they to lose sight of it the eternal trade wind would waft them
into unending waters, from whence would be no return. Here, involved among
tortuous capes and headlands, shoals and reefs, beating, too, against a
continual head wind, often light and sometimes for days and weeks sunk into
utter calm, the provincial vessels in many cases suffered the extremest
hardships in passages which at the present day seem to have been incredibly
protracted. There is on record in some collections of nautical disasters an
account of one of these ships, which, starting on a voyage whose duration
was estimated at ten days, spent four months at sea, and indeed never again
entered harbor, for in the end she was cast away. Singular to tell, this
craft never encountered a gale, but was the vexed sport of malicious calms
and currents. Thrice, out of provisions, she put back to an intermediate
port and started afresh, but only again to return. Frequent fogs enveloped
her, so that no observation could be had of her place, and once, when all
hands were joyously anticipating sight of their destination, lo! the vapors
lifted and disclosed the mountains from which they had taken their first
departure. In the like deceptive vapors she at last struck upon a reef,
whence ensued a long series of calamities too sad to detail.

It was the famous pilot Juan Fernandez, immortalized by the island named
after him, who put an end to these coasting tribulations, by boldly
venturing the experiment -- as De Gama did before him with respect to
Europe -- of standing broad out from land. Here he found the winds
favorable for getting to the south, and by running westward till beyond the
influences of the trades, he regained the coast without difficulty; making
the passage which, though in a high degree circuitous, proved far more
expeditious than the nominally direct one. Now it was upon these new
tracks, and about the year 1670, or thereabouts, that the Enchanted Isles,
and the rest of the sentinel groups, as they may be called, were
discovered. Though I know of no account as to whether any of them were
found inhabited or no, it may be reasonably concluded that they have been
immemorial solitudes. But let us return to Rodondo.

Southwest from our tower lies all Polynesia, hundreds of leagues away; but
straight west, on the precise line of his parallel, no land rises till your
keel is beached upon the Kingsmills, a nice little sail of, say, 5,000
miles.

Having thus by such distant references -- with Rodondo the only possible
ones -- settled our relative place on the sea, let us consider objects not
quite so remote. Behold the grim and charred Enchanted Isles. This nearest
crater-shaped headland is part of Albemarle, the largest of the group,
being some sixty miles or more long, and fifteen broad. Did you ever lay
eye on the real genuine Equator? Have you ever, in the largest sense, toed
the Line? Well, that identical crater-shaped headland there, all yellow
lava, is cut by the Equator exactly as a knife cuts straight through the
center of a pumpkin pie. If you could only see so far, just to one side of
that same headland, across yon low dikey ground, you would catch sight of
the isle of Narborough, the loftiest land of the cluster; no soil whatever,
one seamed clinker from top to bottom, abounding in black caves like
smithies, its metallic shore ringing under foot like plates of iron, its
central volcanoes standing grouped like a gigantic chimney stack.

Narborough and Albemarle are neighbors after a quite curious fashion. A
familiar diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood:

                                     E

Cut a channel at the above letter joint, and the middie transverse limb is
Narborough, and all the rest is Albemarle. Volcanic Narborough lies in the
black jaws of Albemarle like a wolf's red tongue in his open mouth.

If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in round
numbers, the statistics, according to the most reliable estimates made upon
the spot:

     Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . none
     Anteaters . . . . . . . . . . . . .unknown
     Man-haters . . . . . . . . . . . . unknown
     Lizards . . . . . . . . . . . . . .500,000
     Snakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000
     Spiders . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000,000
     Salamanders . . . . . . . . . . . .unknown
     Devils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . unknown

     Making a clean total of . . . . 11,000,000

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, anteaters, man-haters, and
salamanders.

Albemarle opens his mouth towards the setting sun. His distended jaws form
a great bay, which Narborough, his tongue, divides into halves, one whereof
is called Weather Bay, the other Lee Bay; while the volcanic promontories,
terminating his coasts are styled South Head and North Head. I note this
because these bays are famous in the annals of the sperm whale fishery. The
whales come here at certain seasons to calve. When ships first cruised
hereabouts, I am told, they used to blockade the entrance of Lee Bay, when,
their boats going round by Weather Bay, passed through Narborough channel,
and so had the leviathans very neatly in a pen.

The day after we took fish at the base of this Round Tower, we had a fine
wind, and, shooting round the north headland, suddenly descried a fleet of
fully thirty sail, all beating to windward like a squadron in line. A brave
sight as ever man saw. A most harmonious concord of rushing keels. Their
thirty kelsons hummed like thirty harp strings, and looked as straight
whilst they left their parallel traces on the sea. But there proved too
many hunters for the game. The fleet broke up, and went their separate ways
out of sight, leaving my own ship and two trim gentlemen of London. These
last, finding no luck either, likewise vanished, and Lee Bay, with all its
appurtenances, and without a rival, devolved to us.

The way of cruising here is this. you keep hovering about the entrance of
the bay, in one beat and out the next. But at times -- not always, as in
other parts of the group -- a race horse of a current sweeps right across
its mouth. So, with all sails set, you carefully ply your tacks. How often,
standing at the foremast head at sunrise, with our patient prow pointed in
between these isles, did I gaze upon that land, not of cakes, but of
clinkers, not of streams of sparkling water, but arrested torrents of
tormented lava.

As the ship runs in from the open sea, Narborough presents its side in one
dark craggy mass, soaring up some five or six thousand feet, at which point
it hoods itself in heavy clouds, whose lowest level fold is as clearly
defined against the rocks as the snow line against the Andes. There is dire
mischief going on in that upper dark. There toil the demons of fire, who,
at intervals, irradiate the nights with a strange spectral illumination for
miles and miles around, but unaccompanied by any further demonstration, or
else suddenly announce themselves by terrific concussions and the full
drama of a volcanic eruption. The blacker that cloud by day, the more may
you look for light by night. Often whalemen have found themselves cruising
nigh that burning mountain when all aglow with a ballroom blaze. Or,
rather, glassworks, you may call this same vitreous isle of Narborough,
with its tall chimney stacks.

Where we still stand, here on Rodondo, we cannot see all the other isles,
but it is a good place from which to point out where they lie. Yonder,
though, to the E.N.E., I mark a distant dusky ridge. It is Abington Isle,
one of the most northerly of the group, so solitary, remote, and blank, it
looks like No-Man's Land seen off our northern shore. I doubt whether two
human beings ever touched upon that spot. So far as yon Abington Isle is
concerned, Adam and his billions of posterity remain uncreated.

Ranging south of Abington, and quite out of sight behind the long spine of
Albemarle, lies James's Isle, so called by the early Buccaneers after the
luckless Stuart, Duke of York. Observe here, by the way, that, excepting
the isles particularized in comparatively recent times, and which mostly
received the names of famous admirals, the Encantadas were first christened
by the Spaniards; but these Spanish names were generally effaced on English
charts by the subsequent christenings of the Buccaneers, who, in the middle
of the seventeenth century, called them after English noblemen and kings.
Of these loyal freebooters and the things which associate their name with
the Encantadas, we shall hear anon. Nay, for one little item, immediately,
for between James's Isle and Albemarle lies a fantastic islet, strangely
known as "Cowley's Enchanted Isle." But, as all the group is deemed
enchanted, the reason must be given for the spell within a spell involved
by this particular designation. The name was bestowed by that excellent
Buccaneer himself, on his first visit here. Speaking in his published
voyages on this spot, he says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's
Enchanted Isle, for, we having had a sight of it upon several points of the
compass, it appeared always in so many different forms; sometimes like a
ruined fortification; upon another point like a great city," etc. No wonder
though, that among the Encantadas all sorts of ocular deceptions and
mirages should be met.

That Cowley linked his name with this self-transforming and bemocking isle
suggests the possibility that it conveyed to him some meditative image of
himself. At least, as is not impossible, if he were any relative of the
mildly thoughtful and self-upbraiding poet Cowley, who lived about his
time, the conceit might seem not unwarranted; for that sort of thing
evinced in the naming of this isle runs in the blood, and may be seen in
pirates as in poets.

Still south of James's Isle lie Jervis Isle, Duncan Isle, Crossman's Isle,
Brattle Isle, Wood's Isle, Chatham Isle, and various lesser isles, for the
most part an archipelago of aridities, without inhabitant, history, or hope
of either in all time to come. But not far from these are rather notable
Isles -- Barrington, Charles's, Norfolk, and Hood's. Succeeding chapters
will reveal some ground for their notability.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                Sketch Fifth
                       The Frigate, and Ship Flyaway

"Looking far forth into the ocean wide,
A goodly ship with banners bravely dight,
And flag in her top-gallant I espide,
Through the main sea making her merry flight."

Ere quitting Rodondo, it must not be omitted that here, in 1813, the U.S.
frigate Essex, Captain David Porter, came near leaving her bones. Lying
becalmed one morning with a strong current setting her rapidly towards the
rock, a strange sail was descried, which -- not out of keeping with alleged
enchantments of the neighborhood -- seemed to be staggering under a violent
wind, while the frigate lay lifeless as if spellbound. But a light air
springing up, all sail was made by the frigate in chase of the enemy, as
supposed -- he being deemed an English whale-ship -- but the rapidity of
the current was so great that soon all sight was lost of him, and, at
meridian, the Essex, spite of her drags, was driven so close under the
foam-lashed cliffs of Rodondo that, for a time, all hands gave her up. A
smart breeze, however, at last helped her off, though the escape was so
critical as to seem almost miraculous.

Thus saved from destruction herself, she now made use of that salvation to
destroy the other vessel, if possible. Renewing the chase in the direction
in which the stranger had disappeared, sight was caught of him the
following morning. Upon being descried he hoisted American colors and stood
away from the Essex. A calm ensued, when, still confident that the stranger
was an Englishman, Porter dispatched a cutter, not to board the enemy, but
drive back his boats engaged in towing him. The cutter succeeded. Cutters
were subsequently sent to capture him, the stranger now showing English
colors in place of American. But, when the frigate's boats were within a
short distance of their hoped-for prize, another sudden breeze sprang up;
the stranger, under all sail, bore off to the westward, and, ere night, was
hull down ahead of the Essex, which, all this time, lay perfectly becalmed.

This enigmatic craft -- American in the morning, and English in the
evening, her sails full of wind in a calm -- was never again beheld. An
enchanted ship, no doubt. So, at least, the sailors swore.

This cruise of the Essex in the Pacific during the war of 1812, is,
perhaps, the strangest and most stirring to be found in the history of the
American navy. She captured the furthest wandering vessels, visited the
remotest seas and isles; long hovered in the charmed vicinity of the
enchanted group, and, finally, valiantly gave up the ghost fighting two
English frigates in the harbor of Valparaiso. Mention is made of her here
for the same reason that the Buccaneers will likewise receive record:
because, like them, by long cruising among the isles, tortoise-hunting upon
their shores, and generally exploring them, for these and other reasons,
the Essex is peculiarly associated with the Encantadas.

Here be it said that you have but three eyewitness authorities worth
mentioning touching the Enchanted Isles: Cowley, the Buccaneer (1684);
Colnet, the whaling-ground explorer (1798); Porter, the post captain
(1813). Other than these you have but barren, bootless allusions from some
few passing voyagers or compilers.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                Sketch Sixth
                     Barrington Isle and the Buccaneers

"Let us all servile base subjection scorn,
And as we be sons of the earth so wide,
Let us our father's heritage divide,
And challenge to ourselves our portions dew
Of all the patrimony, which a few
Now hold on hugger-mugger in their hand."

"Lords of the world, and so will wander free,
Whereso us listeth, uncontrolled of any."

"How bravely now we live, how jocund, how near the first inheritance,
without fear, how free from little troubles!"

Near two centuries ago Barrington Isle was the resort of that famous wing
of the West Indian Buccaneers, which, upon their repulse from the Cuban
waters, crossing the Isthmus of Darien, ravaged the Pacific side of the
Spanish colonies, and, with the regularity and timing of a modern mail,
waylaid the royal treasure ships plying between Manila and Acapulco. After
the toils of piratic war, here they came to say their prayers, enjoy their
free-and-easies, count their crackers from the cask, their doubloons from
the keg, and measure their silks of Asia with long Toledos for their
yardsticks.

As a secure retreat, an undiscoverable hiding place, no spot in those days
could have been better fitted. In the center of a vast and silent sea but
very little traversed, surrounded by islands whose inhospitable aspect
might well drive away the chance navigator and yet within a few days' sail
of the opulent countries which they made their prey, the unmolested
Buccaneers found here that tranquillity which they fiercely denied to every
civilized harbor in that part of the world. Here, after stress of weather,
or a temporary drubbing at the hands of their vindictive foes, or in swift
flight with golden booty, those old marauders came, and lay snugly out of
all harm's reach. But not only was the place a harbor of safety, and a
bower of ease, but for utility in other things it was most admirable.

Barrington Isle is, in many respects, singularly adapted to careening,
refitting, refreshing, and other seamen's purposes. Not only has it good
water, and good anchorage, well sheltered from all winds by the high land
of Albemarle, but it is the least unproductive isle of the group. Tortoises
good for food, trees good for fuel, and long grass good for bedding, abound
here, and there are pretty natural walks, and several landscapes to be
seen. Indeed, though in its locality belonging to the Enchanted group,
Barrington Isle is so unlike most of its neighbors that it would hardly
seem of kin to them.

"I once landed on its western side," says a sentimental voyager long ago,
"where it faces the black buttress of Albemarle. I walked beneath groves of
trees -- not very lofty, and not palm trees, or orange trees, or peach
trees, to be sure -- but, for all that, after long seafaring, very
beautiful to walk under, even though they supplied no fruit. And here, in
calm spaces at the heads of glades, and on the shaded tops of slopes
commanding the most quiet scenery -- what do you think I saw? Seats which
might have served Brahmins and presidents of peace societies. Fine old
ruins of what had once been symmetric lounges of stone and turf, they bore
every mark both of artificialness and age, and were, undoubtedly, made by
the Buccaneers. One had been a long sofa with back and arms, just such a
sofa as the poet Gray might have loved to throw himself upon, his Crebillon
in hand.

"Though they sometimes tarried here for months at a time, and used the spot
for a storing place for spare spars, sails, and casks, yet it is highly
improbable that the Buccaneers ever erected dwelling houses upon the isle.
They never were here except their ships remained, and they would most
likely have slept on board. I mention this because I cannot avoid the
thought that it is hard to impute the construction of these romantic seats
to any other motive than one of pure peacefulness and kindly fellowship
with nature. That the Buccaneers perpetrated the greatest outrages is very
true, that some of them were mere cutthroats is not to be denied; but we
know that here and there among their host was a Dampier, a Wafer, and a
Cowley, and likewise other men, whose worst reproach was their desperate
fortunes -- whom persecution, or adversity, or secret and unavengeable
wrongs, had driven from Christian society to seek the melancholy solitude
or the guilty adventures of the sea. At any rate, long as those ruins of
seats on Barrington remain, the most singular monuments are furnished to
the fact that all of the Buccaneers were not unmitigated monsters.

"But during my ramble on the isle I was not long in discovering other
tokens of things quite in accordance with those wild traits, popularly, and
no doubt truly enough, imputed to the freebooters at large. Had I picked up
old sails and rusty hoops I would only have thought of the ship's carpenter
and cooper. But I found old cutlasses and daggers reduced to mere threads
of rust, which, doubtless, had stuck between Spanish ribs ere now. These
were signs of the murderer and robber; the reveler likewise had left his
trace. Mixed with shells, fragments of broken jars were lying here and
there, high up upon the beach. They were precisely like the jars now used
upon the Spanish coast for the wine and pisco spirits of that country.

"With a rusty dagger fragment in one hand, and a bit of a wine jar in
another, I sat me down on the ruinous green sofa I have spoken of and
bethought me long and deeply of these same Buccaneers. Could it be possible
that they robbed and murdered one day, reveled the next, and rested
themselves by turning meditative philosophers, rural poets, and
seat-builders on the third? Not very improbable, after all. For consider
the vacillations of a man. Still, strange as it may seem, I must also abide
by the more charitable thought, namely, that among these adventurers were
some gentlemanly, companionable souls, capable of genuine tranquillity and
virtue."
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                               Sketch Seventh
                      Charles's Isle and the Dog-King

-- So with outrageous cry,
A thousand villeins round about him swarmed
Out of the rocks and caves adjoining nye;
Vile caitive wretches, ragged, rude, deformed;
All threatning death, all in straunge manner armed;
Some with unweldy clubs, some with long speares,
Some rusty knives, some staves in fier warmd.

We will not be of any occupation,
Let such vile vassals, born to base vocation,
Drudge in the world, and for their living droyle,
Which have no wit to live withouten toyle.

Southwest of Barrington ties Charles's Isle. And hereby hangs a history
which I gathered long ago from a shipmate learned in all the lore of
outlandish life.

During the successful revolt of the Spanish provinces from Old Spain, there
fought on behalf of Peru a certain Creole adventurer from Cuba, who, by his
bravery and good fortune, at length advanced himself to high rank in the
patriot army. The war being ended, Peru found itself like many valorous
gentlemen, free and independent enough, but with few shot in the locker. In
other words, Peru had not wherewithal to pay off its troops. But the Creole
-- I forget his name -- volunteered to take his pay in lands. So they told
him he might have his pick of the Enchanted Isles, which were then, as they
still remain, the nominal appanage of Peru. The soldier straightway embarks
thither, explores the group, returns to Callao, and says he will take a
deed of Charles's Isle. Moreover, this deed must stipulate that thenceforth
Charles's Isle is not only the sole property of the Creole, but is forever
free of Peru, even as Peru of Spain. To be short, this adventurer procures
himself to be made in effect Supreme Lord of the Island, one of the princes
of the powers of the earth.*

He now sends forth a proclamation inviting subjects to his as yet
unpopulated kingdom. Some eighty souls, men and women, respond, and being
provided by their leader with necessaries, and tools of various sorts,
together with a few cattle and goats, take ship for the promised land, the
last arrival on board, prior to sailing, being the Creole himself,
accompanied, strange to say, by a disciplined cavalry company of large grim
dogs. These, it was observed on the passage, refusing to consort with the
emigrants, remained aristocratically grouped around their master on the
elevated quarter-deck, casting disdainful glances forward upon the inferior
rabble there, much as, from the ramparts, the soldiers of a garrison,
thrown into a conquered town, eye the inglorious citizen-mob over which
they are set to watch.

Now Charles's Isle not only resembles Barrington Isle in being much more
inhabitable than other parts of the group, but it is double the size of
Barrington, say forty or fifty miles in circuit.

Safely debarked at last, the company, under direction of their lord and
patron, forthwith proceeded to build their capital city. They make
considerable advance in the way of walls of clinkers, and lava floors,
nicely sanded with cinders. On the least barren hills they pasture their
cattle, while the goats, adventurers by nature, explore the far inland
solitudes for a scanty livelihood of lofty herbage. Meantime, abundance of
fish and tortoises supply their other wants.

The disorders incident to settling all primitive regions in the present
case were heightened by the peculiarly untoward character of many of the
pilgrims. His Majesty was forced at last to proclaim martial law and
actually hunted and shot with his own hand several of his rebellious
subjects, who, with most questionable intentions, had clandestinely
encamped in the interior, whence they stole by night, to prowl barefooted
on tiptoe round the precincts of the lava palace. It is to be remarked,
however, that prior to such stern proceedings, the more reliable men had
been judiciously picked out for an infantry bodyguard, subordinate to the
cavalry bodyguard of dogs. But the state of politics in this unhappy nation
may be somewhat imagined from the circumstance that all who were not of the
bodyguard were downright plotters and malignant raitors. At length the
death penalty was tacitly abolished, owing to the timely thought that, were
strict sportsman's justice to be dispensed among such subjects, ere long
the Nimrod King would have little or no remaining game to shoot. The human
part of the lifeguard was now disbanded and set to work cultivating the
soil and raising potatoes, the regular army now solely consisting of the
dog-regiment. These, as I have heard, were of a singularly ferocious
character, though by severe training rendered docile to their master. Armed
to the teeth, the Creole now goes in state, surrounded by his canine
janizaries, whose terrific bayings prove quite as serviceable as bayonets
in keeping down the surgings of revolt.

But the census of the isle, sadly lessened by the dispensation of justice,
and not materially recruited by matrimony, began to fill his mind with sad
mistrust. Some way the population must be increased. Now, from its
possessing a little water, and its comparative pleasantness of aspect,
Charles's Isle at this period was occasionally visited by foreign whalers.
These His Majesty had always levied upon for port charges, thereby
contributing to his revenue. But now he had additional designs. By
insidious arts he, from time to time, cajoles certain sailors to desert
their ships and enlist beneath his banner. Soon as missed, their captains
crave permission to go and hunt them up. Whereupon His Majesty first hides
them very carefully away, and then freely permits the search. In
consequence, the delinquents are never found, and the ships retire without
them.

Thus, by a two-edged policy of this crafty monarch, foreign nations were
crippled in the number of their subjects, and his own were greatly
multiplied. He particularly petted these renegade strangers. But alas for
the deep-laid schemes of ambitious princes, and alas for the vanity of
glory. As the foreign-born Pretorians, unwisely introduced into the Roman
state, and still more unwisely made favorites of the emperors, at last
insulted and overturned the throne, even so these lawless mariners, with
all the rest of the bodyguard and all the populace, broke out into a
terrible mutiny, and defied their master. He marched against them with all
his dogs. A deadly battle ensued upon the beach. It raged for three hours,
the dogs fighting with determined valor, and the sailors reckless of
everything but victory. Three men and thirteen dogs were left dead upon the
field, many on both sides were wounded, and the king was forced to fly with
the remainder of his canine regiment. The enemy pursued, stoning the dogs
with their master into the wilderness of the interior. Discontinuing the
pursuit, the victors returned to the village on the shore, stove the spirit
casks, and proclaimed a republic. The dead men were interred with the honor
of war, and the dead dogs ignominiously thrown into the sea. At last,
forced by stress of suffering, the fugitive Creole came down from the hills
and offered to treat for peace. But the rebels refused it on any other
terms than his unconditional banishment. Accordingly, the next ship that
arrived recarried away the ex-king to Peru.

The history of the king of Charles's Island furnishes another illustration
of the difficulty of colonizing barren islands with unprincipled pilgrims.

Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in Peru,
which afforded him a safe asylum in his calamity, watched every arrival
from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the republic, the
consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to royalty.
Doubtless he deemed the republic but a miserable experiment which would
soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated themselves into a
democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American. Nay, it was no democracy at
all, but a permanent riotocracy, which gloried in having no law but
lawlessness. Great inducements being offered to deserters, their ranks were
swelled by accessions of scamps from every ship which touched their shores.
Charles's Island was proclaimed the asylum of the oppressed of all navies.
Each runaway tar was hailed as a martyr in the cause of freedom, and became
immediately installed a regged citizen of this universal nation. In vain
the captains of absconding seamen strove to regain them. Their new
compatriots were ready to give any number of ornamental eyes in their
behalf. They had few cannon, but their fists were not to be trifled with.
So at last it came to pass that no vessels acquainted with the character of
that country durst touch there, however sorely in want of refreshment. It
became anathema -- a sea Alsatia -- the unassailed lurking place of all
sorts of desperadoes, who in the name of liberty did just what they
pleased. They continually fluctuated in their numbers. Sailors, deserting
ships at other islands, or in boats at sea anywhere in that vicinity,
steered for Charles's Isle as to their sure home of refuge; while, sated
with the life of the isle, numbers from time to time crossed the water to
the neighboring ones and there presenting themselves to strange captains as
shipwrecked seamen often succeeded in getting on board vessels bound to the
Spanish coast, and having a compassionate purse made up for them on landing
there.

One warm night during my first visit to the group, our ship was floating
along in languid stillness when someone on the forecastle shouted "Light
ho!" We looked and saw a beacon burning on some obscure land off the beam.
Our third mate was not intimate with this part of the world. Going to the
captain he said, "Sir, shall I put off in a boat? These must be shipwrecked
men."

The captain laughed rather grimly, as, shaking his fist towards the beacon,
he rapped out an oath, and said, "No, no, you precious rascals, you don't
juggle one of my boats ashore this blessed night. You do well, you thieves
-- you do benevolently to hoist a light yonder as on a dangerous shoal. It
tempts no wise man to pull off and see what's the matter, but bids them
steer small and keep off shore -- that is Charles's Island; brace up, Mr.
Mate, and keep the light astern."

*The American Spaniards have long been in the habit of making presents of
islands to deserving individuals. The pilot Juan Fernandez procured a deed
of the isle named after him, and for some years resided there before
Selkirk came. It is supposed, however, that he eventually contracted the
blues upon his princely property, for after a time he returned to the main,
and as report goes, became a very garrulous barber in the city of Lima.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                               Sketch Eighth
                      Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow

"At last they in an island did espy
A seemly woman sitting by the shore,
That with great sorrow and sad agony
Seemed some great misfortune to deplore,
And loud to them for succor called evermore."

"Black his eye as the midnight sky,
White his neck as the driven snow,
Red his cheek as the morning light; --
Cold he lies in the ground below.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bedys,
All under the cactus tree."

"Each lonely scene shall thee restore,
For thee the tear be duly shed;
Belov'd till life can charm no more,
And mourned till Pity's self be dead."

Far to the northeast of Charles's Isle, sequestered from the rest, lies
Norfolk Isle, and, however insignificant to most voyagers, to me, through
sympathy, that lone island has become a spot made sacred by the strangest
trials of humanity.

It was my first visit to the Encantadas. Two days had been spent ashore in
hunting tortoises. There was not time to capture many, so on the third
afternoon we loosed our sails. We were just in the act of getting under
way, the uprooted anchor yet suspended and invisibly swaying beneath the
wave, as the good ship gradually turned her heel to leave the isle behind,
when the seaman who heaved with me at the windlass paused suddenly and
directed my attention to something moving on the land, not along the beach,
but somewhat back, fluttering from a height.

In view of the sequel of this little story, be it here narrated how it came
to pass that an object which partly from its being so small was quite lost
to every other man on board, still caught the eye of my handspike
companion. The rest of the crew, myself included, merely stood up to our
spikes in heaving, whereas, unwontedly exhilarated, at every turn of the
ponderous windlass, my belted comrade leaped atop of it, with might and
main giving a downward, thewy, perpendicular heave, his raised eye bent in
cheery animation upon the slowly receding shore. Being high lifted above
all others was the reason he perceived the object, otherwise unperceivable;
and this elevation of his eye was owing to the elevation of his spirits;
and this again -- for truth must out -- to a dram of Peruvian pisco, in
guerdon for some kindness done, secretly administered to him that morning
by our mulatto steward. Now, certainly, pisco does a deal of mischief in
the world; yet seeing that, in the present case, it was the means, though
indirect, of rescuing a human being from the most dreadful fate, must we
not also needs admit that sometimes pisco does a deal of good?

Glancing across the water in the direction pointed out, I saw some white
thing hanging from an inland rock, perhaps half a mile from the sea.

"It is a bird, a white-winged bird, perhaps a -- no; it is -- it is a
handkerchief!"

"Aye, a handkerchief!" echoed my comrade, and with a louder shout apprised
the captain.

Quickly now -- like the running out and training of a great gun -- the long
cabin spyglass was thrust through the mizzen-rigging from the high platform
of the poop, whereupon a human figure was plainly seen upon the inland
rock, eagerly waving towards us what seemed to be the handkerchief.

Our captain was a prompt, good fellow. Dropping the glass, he lustily ran
forward, ordering the anchor to be dropped again, hands to stand by a boat,
and lower away.

In a half-hour's time the swift boat returned. It went with six and came
with seven; and the seventh was a woman.

It is not with artistic heartlessness, but I wish I could but draw in
crayons, for this woman was a most touching sight, and crayons, tracing
softly melancholy lines, would best depict the mournful image of the
dark-damasked Chola widow.

Her story was soon told, and though given in her own strange language was
as quickly understood, for our captain, from long trading on the Chilean
coast, was well versed in the Spanish. A Chola, or half-breed Indian woman,
of Payta in Peru, three years gone by, with her young new-wedded husband
Felipe, of pure Castilian blood, and her one only Indian brother, Truxill,
Hunilla had taken passage on the main in a French whaler, commanded by a
joyous man, which vessel, bound to the cruising grounds beyond the
Enchanted Isles, proposed passing close by their vicinity. The object of
the little party was to procure tortoise oil, a fluid which for its great
purity and delicacy is held in high estimation wherever known, and it is
well known all along this part of the Pacific coast. With a chest of
clothes, tools, cooking utensils, a rude apparatus for trying out the oil,
some casks of biscuit, and other things, not omitting two favorite dogs, of
which faithful animal all the Cholos are very fond, Hunilla and her
companions were safely landed at their chosen place; the Frenchman,
according to the contract made ere sailing, engaged to take them off upon
returning from a four months' cruise in the westward seas, which interval
the three adventurers deemed quite sufficient for their purposes.

On the isle's lone beach they paid him in silver for their passage out, the
stranger having declined to carry them at all except upon that condition;
though willing to take every means to insure the due fulfillment of his
promise. Felipe had striven hard to have this payment put off to the period
of the ship's return. But in vain. Still they thought they had, in another
way, ample pledge of the good faith of the Frenchman. It was arranged that
the expenses of the passage home should not be payable in silver, but in
tortoises -- one hundred tortoises ready captured to the returning
captain's hand. These the Cholos meant to secure after their own work was
done, against the probable time of the Frenchman's coming back, and no
doubt in prospect already felt, that in those hundred tortoises -- now
somewhere ranging the isle's interior -- they possessed one hundred
hostages. Enough: the vessel sailed; the gazing three on shore answered the
loud glee of the singing crew; and, ere evening, the French craft was hull
down in the distant sea, its masts three faintest lines which quickly faded
from Hunilla's eye.

The stranger had given a blithesome promise, and anchored it with oaths,
but oaths and anchors equally will drag; naught else abides on fickle earth
but unkept promises of joy. Contrary winds from out unstable skies, or
contrary moods of his more varying mind, or shipwreck and sudden death in
solitary waves -- whatever was the cause, the blithe stranger never was
seen again.

Yet, however dire a calamity was here in store, misgivings of it ere due
time never disturbed the Cholos' busy mind, now all intent upon the
toilsome matter which had brought them hither. Nay, by swift doom coming
like the thief at night, ere seven weeks went by, two of the little party
were removed from all anxieties of land or sea. No more they sought to gaze
with feverish fear, or still more feverish hope, beyond the present's
horizon line, but into the furthest future their own silent spirits sailed.
By persevering labor beneath that burning sun, Felipe and Truxill had
brought down to their hut many scores of tortoises, and tried out the oil,
when, elated with their good success, and to reward themselves for such
hard work, they, too hastily, made a catamaran, or Indian raft, much used
on the Spanish main, and merrily started on a fishing trip, just without a
long reef with many jagged gaps, running parallel with the shore, about
half a mile from it. By some bad tide or hap, or natural negligence of
joyfulness (for though they could not be heard, yet by their gestures they
seemed singing all the time) forced in deep water against that iron bar,
the ill-made catamaran was overset, and came all to pieces, when, dashed by
broad-chested swells between their broken logs and the sharp teeth of the
reef, both adventurers perished before Hunilla's eyes.

Before Hunilla's eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed before
her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated on a rude bower
among the withered thickets crowning a lofty cliff, a little back from the
beach. The thickets were so disposed that in looking upon the sea at large
she peered out from among the branches as from the lattice of a high
balcony. But upon the day we speak of here, the better to watch the
adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had withdrawn the branches
to one side, and held them so. They formed an oval frame, through which the
bluely boundless sea rolled like a painted one. And there the invisible
painter painted to her view the wave-tossed and disjointed raft, its once
level logs slantingly upheaved, as raking masts, and the four struggling
arms undistinguishable among them, and then all subsided into
smooth-flowing creamy waters, slowly drifting the splintered wreck, while,
first and last, no sound of any sort was heard. Death in a silent picture,
a dream of the eye, such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows.

So instant was the scene, so trancelike its mild pictorial effect, so
distant from her blasted bower and her common sense of things, that Hunilla
gazed and gazed, nor raised a finger or a wail. But as good to sit thus
dumb, in stupor staring on that dumb show, for all that otherwise might be
done. With half a mile of sea between, how could her two enchanted arms aid
those four fated ones? The distance long, the time one sand. After the
lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the thunderbolt? Felipe's body
was washed ashore, but Truxill's never came, only his gay, braided hat of
golden straw -- that same sunflower thing he waved to her, pushing from the
strand -- and now, to the last gallant, it still saluted her. But Felipe's
body floated to the marge, with one arm encirclingly outstretched.
Lockjawed in grim death, the lover-husband softly clasped his bride, true
to her even in death's dream. Ah, heaven, when man thus keeps his faith,
wilt thou be faithless who created the faithful one? But they cannot break
faith who never plighted it.

It needs not to be said what nameless misery now wrapped the lonely widow.
In telling her own story she passed this almost entirely over, simply
recounting the event. Construe the comment of her features as you might,
from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was herself
the heroine of her tale. But not thus did she defraud us of our tears. All
hearts bled that grief could be so brave.

She but showed us her soul's lid, and the strange ciphers thereon engraved;
all within, with pride's timidity, was withheld. Yet was there one
exception. Holding out her small olive hand before her captain, she said in
mild and slowest Spanish, "Senor, I buried him," then paused, struggled as
against the writhed coilings of a snake, and, cringing suddenly, leaped up,
repeating in impassioned pain, "I buried him, my life, my soul!"

Doubtless it was by half-unconscious, automatic motions of her hands, that
this heavy-hearted one performed the final office for Felipe, and planted a
rude cross of withered sticks -- no green ones might be had -- at the head
of that lonely grave, where rested now in lasting uncomplaint and quiet
haven he whom untranquil seas had overthrown.

But some dull sense of another body that should be interred, of another
cross that should hallow another grave -- unmade as yet -- some dull
anxiety and pain touching her undiscovered brother, now haunted the
oppressed Hunilla. Her hands fresh from the burial earth, she slowly went
back to the beach, with unshaped purposes wandering there, her spellbound
eye bent upon the incessant waves. But they bore nothing to her but a
dirge, which maddened her to think that murderers should mourn. As time
went by, and these things came less dreamingly to her mind, the strong
persuasions of her Romish faith, which sets peculiar store by consecrated
urns, prompted her to resume in waking earnest that pious search which had
but begun as in somnambulism. Day after day, week after week, she trod the
cindery beach, till at length a double motive edged every eager glance.
With equal longing she now looked for the living and the dead, the brother
and the captain, alike vanished, never to return. Little accurate note of
time had Hunilla taken under such emotions as were hers, and little,
outside herself, served for calendar or dial. As to poor Crusoe in the
selfsame sea, no saint's bell pealed forth the lapse of week or month; each
day went by unchallenged; no chanticleer announced those sultry dawns, no
lowing herds those poisonous nights. All wonted and steadily recurring
sounds, human, or humanized by sweet fellowship with man, but one stirred
that torrid trance -- the cry of dogs; save which naught but the rolling
sea invaded it, an all-pervading monotone, and to the widow that was the
least loved voice she could have heard.

No wonder that, as her thoughts now wandered to the unreturning ship and
were beaten back again, the hope against hope so struggled in her soul that
at length she desperately said, "Not yet, not yet; my foolish heart runs on
too fast." So she forced patience for some further weeks. But to those whom
earth's sure indraft draws, patience or impatience is still the same.

Hunilla now sought to settle precisely in her mind, to an hour, how long it
was since the ship had sailed, and then, with the same precision, how long
a space remained to pass. But this proved impossible. What present day or
month it was she could not say. Time was her labyrinth, in which Hunilla
was entirely lost.

And now follows --

Against my own purposes a pause descends upon me here. One knows not
whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to
certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it be good to blazon
such. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how,
then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will
hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.
But in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth just there whither
it listeth; for ill or good, man cannot know. Often ill comes from the
good, as good from ill.

When Hunilla --

Dire sight it is to see some silken beast long dally with a golden lizard
ere she devour. More terrible to see how feline Fate will sometimes dally
with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair
with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp this catlike thing,
sporting with the heart of him who reads, for if he feel not he reads in
vain.

-- "The ship sails this day, today," at last said Hunilla to herself; "this
gives me certain time to stand on; without certainty I go mad. In loose
ignorance I have hoped and hoped; now in firm knowledge I will but wait.
Now I live and no longer perish in bewilderings. Holy Virgin, aid me! Thou
wilt waft back the ship. Oh, past length of weary weeks -- all to be
dragged over -- to buy the certainty of today, I freely give ye, though I
tear ye from me!"

As mariners, tossed in tempest on some desolate ledge, patch them a boat
out of the remnants of their vessel's wreck, and launch it in the selfsame
waves, see here Hunilla, this lone shipwrecked soul, out of treachery
invoking trust. Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the
laureled victor, but in this vanquished one.

Truly Hunilla leaned upon a reed, a real one -- no metaphor; a real Eastern
reed. A piece of hollow cane, drifted from unknown isles, and found upon
the beach, its once jagged ends rubbed smoothly even as by sandpaper, its
golden glazing gone. Long ground between the sea and land, upper and nether
stone, the unvarnished substance was filed bare, and wore another polish
now, one with itself, the polish of its agony. Circular lines at intervals
cut all round this surface, divided it into six panels of unequal length.
In the first were scored the days, each tenth one marked by a longer and
deeper notch; the second was scored for the number of seafowl eggs for
sustenance, picked out from the rocky nests; the third, how many fish had
been caught from the shore; the fourth, how many small tortoises found
inland; the fifth, how many days of sun; the sixth, of clouds; which last,
of the two, was the greater one. Long night of busy numbering, misery's
mathematics, to weary her too-wakeful soul to sleep; yet sleep for that was
none.

The panel of the days was deeply worn -- the long tenth notches half
effaced, as alphabets of the blind. Ten thousand times the longing widow
had traced her finger over the bamboo -- dull flute, which, played on, gave
no sound -- as if counting birds flown by in air would hasten tortoises
creeping through the woods.

After the one hundred and eightieth day no further mark was seen; that last
one was the faintest, as the first the deepest.

"There were more days," said our captain; "Many, many more; why did you not
go on and notch them, too, Hunilla?"

"Senor, ask me not."

"And meantime, did no other vessel pass the isle?"

"Nay, senor; -- but --"

"You do not speak; but what, Hunilla?"

"Ask me not, senor."

"You saw ships pass, far away; you waved to them; they passed on -- was
that it, Hunilla?"

"Senor, be it as you say."

Braced against her woe, Hunilla would not, durst not, trust the weakness of
her tongue. Then when our captain asked whether any whaleboats had --

But no, I will not file this thing complete for scoffing souls to quote,
and call it firm proof upon their side. The half shall here remain untold.
Those two unnamed events which befell Hunilla on this isle, let them abide
between her and her God. In nature, as in law, it may be libelous to speak
some truths.

Still, how it was that, although our vessel had lain three days anchored
nigh the isle, its one human tenant should not have discovered us till just
upon the point of sailing, never to revisit so lone and far a spot, this
needs explaining ere the sequel come.

The place where the French captain had landed the little party was on the
further and opposite end of the isle. There too it was that they had
afterwards built their hut. Nor did the widow in her solitude desert the
spot where her loved ones had dwelt with her, and where the dearest of the
twain now slept his last long sleep, and all her plaints awaked him not,
and he of husbands the most faithful during life.

Now, high broken land rises between the opposite extremities of the isle. A
ship anchored at one side is invisible from the other. Neither is the isle
so small but a considerable company might wander for days through the
wilderness of one side and never be seen, or their halloos heard, by any
stranger holding aloof on the other. Hence Hunilla, who naturally
associated the possible coming of ships with her own part of the isle,
might to the end have remained quite ignorant of the presence of our
vessel, were it not for a mysterious presentiment, borne to her, so our
mariners averred, by this isle's enchanted air. Nor did the widow's answer
undo the thought.

"How did you come to cross the isle this morning, then, Hunilla?" said our
captain.

"Senor, something came flitting by me. It touched my cheek, my heart,
senor."

"What do you say, Hunilla?"

"I have said, senor, something came through the air."

It was a narrow chance. For when in crossing the isle Hunilla gained the
high land in the center, she must then for the first have perceived our
masts, and also marked that their sails were being loosed, perhaps even
heard the echoing chorus of the windlass song. The strange ship was about
to sail, and she behind. With all haste she now descends the height on the
hither side, but soon loses sight of the ship among the sunken jungles at
the mountain's base. She struggles on through the withered branches, which
seek at every step to bar her path, till she comes to the isolated rock,
still some way from the water. This she climbs, to reassure herself. The
ship is still in plainest sight. But now, worn out with overtension,
Hunilla all but faints; she fears to step down from her giddy perch; she is
fain to pause, there where she is, and as a last resort catches the turban
from her head, unfurls and waves it over the jungles towards us.

During the telling of her story the mariners formed a voiceless circle
round Hunilla and the captain, and when at length the word was given to man
the fastest boat, and pull round to the isle's thither side, to bring away
Hunilla's chest and the tortoise oil, such alacrity of both cheery and sad
obedience seldom before was seen. Little ado was made. Already the anchor
had been recommitted to the bottom, and the ship swung calmly to it.

But Hunilla insisted upon accompanying the boat as indispensable pilot to
her hidden hut. So being refreshed with the best the steward could supply,
she started with us. Nor did ever any wife of the most famous admiral, in
her husband's barge, receive more silent reverence of respect than poor
Hunilla from this boat's crew.

Rounding many a vitreous cape and bluff, in two hours' time we shot inside
the fatal reef, wound into a secret cove, looked up along a green
many-gabled lava wall, and saw the island's solitary dwelling.

It hung upon an impending cliff, sheltered on two sides by tangled
thickets, and half-screened from view in front by juttings of the rude
stairway, which climbed the precipice from the sea. Built of canes, it was
thatched with long, mildewed grass. It seemed an abandoned hayrick, whose
haymakers were now no more. The roof inclined but one way, the eaves coming
to within two feet of the ground. And here was a simple apparatus to
collect the dews, or rather doubly-distilled and finest winnowed rains,
which, in mercy or in mockery, the night skies sometimes drop upon these
blighted Encantadas. All along beneath the eaves a spotted sheet, quite
weather-stained, was spread, pinned to short, upright stakes, set in the
shallow sand. A small clinker, thrown into the cloth, weighed its middle
down, thereby straining all moisture into a calabash placed below. This
vessel supplied each drop of water ever drunk upon the isle by the Cholos.
Hunilla told us the calabash would sometimes, but not often, be half filled
overnight. It held six quarts, perhaps. "But," said she, "we were used to
thirst. At sandy Payta, where I live, no shower from heaven ever fell; all
the water there is brought on mules from the inland vales."

Tied among the thickets were some twenty moaning tortoises, supplying
Hunilla's lonely larder, while hundreds of vast tableted black bucklers,
like displaced, shattered tombstones of dark slate, were also scattered
round. These were the skeleton backs of those great tortoises from which
Felipe and Truxill had made their precious oil. Several large calabashes
and two goodly kegs were filled with it. In a pot near by were the caked
crusts of a quantity which had been permitted to evaporate. "They meant to
have strained it off next day," said Hunilla, as she turned aside.

I forgot to mention the most singular sight of all, though the first that
greeted us after landing.

Some ten small, soft-haired, ringleted dogs, of a beautiful breed peculiar
to Peru, set up a concert of glad welcomings when we gained the beach,
which was responded to by Hunilla. Some of these dogs had, since her
widowhood, been born upon the isle, the progeny of the two brought from
Payta. Owing to the jagged steeps and pitfalls, tortuous thickets, sunken
clefts, and perilous intricacies of all sorts in the interior, Hunilla,
admonished by the loss of one favorite among them, never allowed these
delicate creatures to follow her in her occasional birds'-nests climbs and
other wanderings; so that, through long habituation, they offered not to
follow when that morning she crossed the land, and her own soul was then
too full of other things to heed their lingering behind. Yet, all along she
had so clung to them that, besides what moisture they lapped up at early
daybreak from the small scoop holes among the adjacent rocks, she had
shared the dew of her calabash among them; never laying by any considerable
store against those prolonged and utter droughts which, in some disastrous
seasons, warp these isles.

Having pointed out, at our desire, what few things she would like
transported to the ship -- her chest, the oil, not omitting the live
tortoises which she intended for a grateful present to our captain -- we
immediately set to work, catrying them to the boat down the long, sloping
stair of deeply shadowed rock. While my comrades were thus employed, I
looked and Hunilla had disappeared.

It was not curiosity alone, but, it seems to me, something different
mingled with it which prompted me to drop my tortoise and once more gaze
slowly around. I remembered the husband buried by Hunilla's hands. A narrow
pathway led into a dense part of the thickets. Following it through many
mazes, I came out upon a small, round, open space, deeply chambered there.

The mound rose in the middle; a bare heap of finest sand, like that
unverdured heap found at the bottom of an hourglass run out. At its head
stood the cross of withered sticks, the dry, peeled bark still fraying from
it, its transverse limb tied up with rope and forlornly adroop in the
silent air.

Hunilla was partly prostrate upon the grave, her dark head bowed, and lost
in her long, loosened Indian hair, her hands extended to the cross-foot
with a little brass crucifix clasped between -- a crucifix worn
featureless, like an ancient graven knocker long plied in vain. She did not
see me, and I made no noise, but slid aside and left the spot.

A few moments ere all was ready for our going, she reappeared among us. I
looked into her eyes, but saw no tear. There was something which seemed
strangely haughty in her air, and yet it was the air of woe. A Spanish and
an Indian grief, which would not visibly lament. Pride's height in vain
abased to proneness on the rack; nature's pride subduing nature's torture.

Like pages the small and silken dogs surrounded her, as she slowly
descended towards the beach. She caught the two most eager creatures in her
arms: "Mia Teeta! Mia Tomoteeta!" and, fondling them, inquired how many
could we take on board.

The mate commanded the boat's crew -- not a hard-hearted man, but his way
of life had been such that in most things, even in the smallest, simple
utility was his leading motive.

"We cannot take them all, Hunilla; our supplies are short; the winds are
unreliable; we may be a good many days going to Tombez. So take those you
have, Hunilla, but no more."

She was in the boat; the oarsmen, too, were seated; all save one, who stood
ready to push off and then spring himself. With the sagacity of their race,
the dogs now seemed aware that they were in the very instant of being
deserted upon a barren strand. The gunwales of the boat were high; its prow
-- presented inland -- was lifted; so, owing to the water, which they
seemed instinctively to shun, the dogs could not well leap into the little
craft. But their busy paws hard scraped the prow, as it had been some
farmer's door shutting them out from shelter in a winter storm. A clamorous
agony of alarm. They did not howl, or whine; they all but spoke.

"Push off! Give way!" cried the mate. The boat gave one heavy drag and
lurch, and next moment shot swiftly from the beach, turned on her heel, and
sped. The dogs ran howling along the water's marge, now pausing to gaze at
the flying boat, then motioning as if to leap in chase, but mysteriously
withheld themselves, and again ran howling along the beach. Had they been
human beings, hardly would they have more vividly inspired the sense of
desolation. The oars were plied as confederate feathers of two wings. No
one spoke. I looked back upon the beach, and then upon Hunilla, but her
face was set in a stern dusky calm. The dogs crouching in her lap vainly
licked her rigid hands. She never looked behind her, but sat motionless
till we turned a promontory of the coast and lost all sights and sounds
astern. She seemed as one who, having experienced the sharpest of mortal
pangs, was henceforth content to have all lesser heartstrings riven, one by
one. To Hunilla, pain seemed so necessary that pain in other beings, though
by love and sympathy made her own, was unrepiningly to be borne. A heart of
yearning in a frame of steel. A heart of earthy yearning, frozen by the
frost which falleth from the sky.

The sequel is soon told. After a long passage, vexed by calms and baffling
winds, we made the little port of Tombez in Peru, there to recruit the
ship. Payta was not very distant. Our captain sold the tortoise oil to a
Tombez merchant, and adding to the silver a contribution from all hands,
gave it to our silent passenger, who knew not what the mariners had done.

The last seen of lone Hunilla she was passing into Payta town, riding upon
a small gray ass; and before her on the ass's shoulders, she eyed the
jointed workings of the beast's armorial cross.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                Sketch Ninth
                     Hood's Isle and the Hermit Oberlus

"That darkesome glen they enter, where they find
That cursed man low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesly lockes long grouen and unbound,
Disordered hong about his shoulders round,
And hid his face, through which his hollow eyne
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw-bone cheekes, through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into the jawes, as he did never dine.
His garments nought but many ragged clouts,
With thornes together pind and patched reads,
The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts."

Southeast of Crossman's Isle lies Hood's Isle, or McCain's Beclouded lsle,
and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of dark
pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus's Landing. It might
fitly have been styled Charon's.

It received its name from a wild white creature who spent many years here,
in the person of a European bringing into this savage region qualities more
diabolical than are to be found among any of the surrounding cannibals.

About half a century ago, Oberlus deserted at the above-named island, then,
as now, a solitude. He built himself a den of lava and clinkers, about a
mile from the Landing, subsequently called after him, in a vale, or
expanded gulch, containing here and there among the rocks about two acres
of soil capable of rude cultivation, the only place on the isle not too
blasted for that purpose. Here he succeeded in raising a sort of degenerate
potatoes and pumpkins, which from time to time he exchanged with needy
whalemen passing, for spirits or dollars.

His appearance, from all accounts, was that of the victim of some malignant
sorceress; he seemed to have drunk of Circe's cup; beastlike; rags
insufficient to hide his nakedness; his befreckled skin blistered by
continual exposure to the sun; nose flat; countenance contorted, heavy,
earthy; hair and beard unshorn, profuse, and of fiery red. He struck
strangers much as if he were a volcanic creature thrown up by the same
convulsion which exploded into sight the isle. All bepatched and coiled
asleep in his lonely lava den among the mountains, he looked, they say, as
a heaped drift of withered leaves, torn from autumn trees, and so left in
some hidden nook by the whirling halt for an instant of a fierce night
wind, which then ruthlessly sweeps on, somewhere else to repeat the
capricious act. It is also reported to have been the strangest sight, this
same Oberlus, of a sultry, cloudy morning, hidden under his shocking old
black tarpaulin hat, hoeing potatoes among the lava. So warped and crooked
was his strange nature that the very handle of his hoe seemed gradually to
have shrunk and twisted in his grasp, being a wretched bent stick, elbowed
more like a savage's war sickle than a civilized hoe handle. It was his
mysterious custom upon a first encounter with a stranger ever to present
his back, possibly because that was his better side, since it revealed the
least. If the encounter chanced in his garden, as it sometimes did -- the
new-landed strangers going from the seaside straight through the gorge, to
hunt up the queer greengrocer reported doing business here -- Oberlus for a
time hoed on, unmindful of all greeting, jovial or bland; as the curious
stranger would turn to face him, the recluse, hoe in hand, as diligently
would avert himself, bowed over, and sullenly revolving round his murphy
hill. Thus far for hoeing. When planting, his whole aspect and all his
gestures were so malevolently and uselessly sinister and secret that he
seemed rather in act of dropping poison into wells than potatoes into soil.
But among his lesser and more harmless marvels was an idea he ever had that
his visitors came equally as well led by longings to behold the mighty
hermit Oberlus in his royal state of solitude as simply to obtain potatoes,
or find whatever company might be upon a barren isle. It seems incredible
that such a being should possess such vanity, a misanthrope be conceited;
but he really had his notion, and, upon the strength of it, often gave
himself amusing airs to captains. But after all this is somewhat of a piece
with the well-known eccentricity of some convicts, proud of that very
hatefulness which makes them notorious. At other times, another
unaccountable whim would seize him, and he would long dodge advancing
strangers round the clinkered corners of his hut; sometimes, like a
stealthy bear, he would slink through the withered thickets up the
mountains and refuse to see the human face.

Except his occasional visitors from the sea, for a long period the only
companions of Oberlus were the crawling tortoises, and he seemed more than
degraded to their level, having no desires for a time beyond theirs, unless
it were for the stupor brought on by drunkenness. But, sufficiently debased
as he appeared, there yet lurked in him, only awaiting occasion for
discovery, a still further proneness. Indeed, the sole superiority of
Oberlus over the tortoises was his possession of a larger capacity of
degradation, and, along with that, something like an intelligent will to
it. Moreover, what is about to be revealed perhaps will show that selfish
ambition, or the love of rule for its own sake, far from being the peculiar
infirmity of noble minds, is shared by beings which have no mind at all. No
creatures are so selfishly tyrannical as some brutes, as anyone who has
observed the tenants of the pasture must occasionally have observed.

"This island's mine by Sycorax my mother," said Oberlus to himself, glaring
round upon his haggard solitude. By some means, barter or theft -- for in
those days ships at intervals still kept touching at his Landing -- he
obtained an old musket, with a few charges of powder and ball. Possessed of
arms, he was stimulated to enterprise, as a tiger that first feels the
coming of its claws. The long habit of sole dominion over every object
round him, his almost unbroken solitude, his never encountering humanity
except on terms of misanthropic independence or mercantile craftiness, and
even such encounters being comparatively but rare -- all this must have
gradually nourished in him a vast idea of his own importance, together with
a pure animal sort of scorn for all the rest of the universe.

The unfortunate Creole who enjoyed his brief term of royalty at Charles's
Isle was perhaps in some degree influenced by not unworthy motives, such as
prompt other adventurous spirits to lead colonists into distant regions and
assume political pre-eminence over them. His summary execution of many of
his Peruvians is quite pardonable, considering the desperate characters he
had to deal with, while his offering canine battle to the banded rebels
seems under the circumstances altogether just. But for this King Oberlus
and what shortly follows, no shade of palliation can be given. He acted out
of mere delight in tyranny and cruelty, by virtue of a quality in him
inherited from Sycorax his mother. Armed now with that shocking
blunderbuss, strong in the thought of being master of that horrid isle, he
panted for a chance to prove his potency upon the first specimen of
humanity which should fall unbefriended into his hands.

Nor was he long without it. One day he spied a boat upon the beach, with
one man, a Negro, standing by it. Some distance off was a ship, and Oberlus
immediately knew how matters stood. The vessel had put in for wood, and the
boat's crew had gone into the thickets for it. From a convenient spot he
kept watch of the boat, till presently a straggling company appeared loaded
with billets. Throwing these on the beach, they again went into the
thickets, while the Negro proceeded to load the boat.

Oberlus now makes all haste and accosts the Negro, who, aghast at seeing
any living being inhabiting such a solitude, and especially so horrific a
one, immediately falls into a panic, not at all lessened by the ursine
suavity of Oberlus, who begs the favor of assisting him in his labors. The
Negro stands with several billets on his shoulder, in act of shouldering
others, and Oberlus, with a short cord concealed in his bosom, kindly
proceeds to lift those other billets to their place. In so doing, he
persists in keeping behind the Negro, who, rightly suspicious of this, in
vain dodges about to gain the front of Oberlus; but Oberlus dodges also,
till at last, weary of this bootless attempt at treachery, or fearful of
being surprised by the remainder of the party, Oberlus runs off a little
space to a bush, and, fetching his blunderbuss, savagely commands the Negro
to desist work and follow him. He refuses. Whereupon, presenting his piece,
Oberlus snaps at him. Luckily the blunderbuss misses fire, but by this
time, frightened out of his wits, the Negro, upon a second intrepid
summons, drops his billets, surrenders at discretion, and follows on. By a
narrow defile familiar to him, Oberlus speedily removes out of sight of the
water.

On their way up the mountains, he exultingly informs the Negro that
henceforth he is to work for him and be his slave, and that his treatment
would entirely depend on his future conduct. But Oberlus, deceived by the
first impulsive cowardice of the black, in an evil moment slackens his
vigilance. Passing through a narrow way, and perceiving his leader quite
off his guard, the Negro, powerful fellow, suddenly grasps him in his arms,
throws him down, wrests his musketoon from him, ties his hands with the
monster's own cord, shoulders him, and returns with him down to the boat.
When the rest of the party arrive, Oberlus is carried on board the ship.
This proved an Englishman, and a smuggler, a sort of craft not apt to be
overcharitable. Oberlus is severely whipped, then handcuffed, taken ashore,
and compelled to make known his habitation and produce his property. His
potatoes, pumpkins, and tortoises, with a pile of dollars he had hoarded
from his mercantile operations, were secured on the spot. But while the too
vindictive smugglers were busy destroying his hut and garden, Oberlus makes
his escape into the mountains, and conceals himself there in impenetrable
recesses, only known to himself, till the ship sails, when he ventures
back, and by means of an old file which he sticks into a tree, contrives to
free himself from his handcuffs.

Brooding among the ruins of his hut, and the desolate clinkers and extinct
volcanoes of this outcast isle, the insulted misanthrope now meditates a
signal revenge upon humanity, but conceals his purposes. Vessels still
touch the Landing at times, and by-and-by Oberlus is enabled to supply them
with some vegetables.

Warned by his former failure in kidnaping strangers, he now pursues a quite
different plan. When seamen come ashore, he makes up to them like a
free-and-easy comrade, invites them to his hut, and with whatever
affability his redhaired grimness may assume, entreats them to drink his
liquor and be merry. But his guests need little pressing, and so, soon as
rendered insensible, are tied hand and foot, and, pitched among the
clinkers, are there concealed till the ship departs, when, finding
themselves entirely dependent upon Oberlus, alarmed at his changed
demeanor, his savage threats, and above all, that shocking blunderbuss,
they willingly enlist under him, becoming his humble slaves, and Oberlus
the most incredible of tyrants. So much so that two or three perish beneath
his initiating process. He sets the remainder -- four of them -- to
breaking the caked soil, transporting upon their backs loads of loamy
earth, scooped up in moist clefts among the mountains; keeps them on the
roughest fare; presents his piece at the slightest hint of insurrection;
and in all respects converts them into reptiles at his feet -- plebeian
garter snakes to this Lord Anaconda.

At last Oberlus contrives to stock his arsenal with four rusty cutlasses
and an added supply of powder and ball intended for his blunderbuss.
Remitting in good part the labor of his slaves, he now approves himself a
man, or rather devil, of great abilities in the way of cajoling or coercing
others into acquiescence with his own ulterior designs, however at first
abhorrent to them. But indeed, prepared for almost any eventual evil by
their previous lawless life, as a sort of ranging cowboys of the sea, which
had dissolved within them the whole moral man so that they were ready to
concrete in the first offered mold of baseness now; rotted down from
manhood by their hopeless misery on the isle, wonted to cringe in all
things to their lord, himself the worst of slaves, these wretches were now
become wholly corrupted to his hands. He used them as creatures of an
inferior race; in short, he gaffles his four animals and makes murderers of
them, out of cowards fitly manufacturing bravos.

Now, sword or dagger, human arms are but artificial claws and fangs, tied
on like false spurs to the fighting cock. So, we repeat, Oberlus, tsar of
the isle, gaffles his four subjects; that is, with intent of glory, puts
four rusty cutlasses into their hands. Like any other autocrat, he had a
noble army now.

It might be thought a servile war would hereupon ensue. Arms in the hands
of trodden slaves? how indiscreet of Emperor Oberlus! Nay, they had but
cutlasses -- sad old scythes enough -- he a blunderbuss, which by its blind
scatterings of all sorts of boulders, clinkers, and other scoria would
annihilate all four mutineers, like four pigeons at one shot. Besides, at
first he did not sleep in his accustomed hut; every lurid sunset, for a
time, he might have been seen wending his way among the riven mountains,
there to secrete himself till dawn in some sulphurous pitfall,
undiscoverable to his gang; but finding this at last too troublesome, he
now each evening tied his slaves hand and foot, hid the cutlasses, and
thrusting them into his barracks, shut to the door, and, lying down before
it, beneath a rude shed lately added, slept out the night, blunderbuss in
hand.

It is supposed that not content with daily parading over a cindery solitude
at the head of his fine army, Oberlus now meditated the most active
mischief, his probable object being to surprise some passing ship touching
at his dominions, massacre the crew, and run away with her to parts
unknown. While these plans were simmering in his head, two ships touch in
company at the isle, on the opposite side to his, when his designs undergo
a sudden change.

The ships are in want of vegetables, which Oberlus promises in great
abundance, provided they send their boats round to his Landing, so that the
crews may bring the vegetables from his garden, informing the two captains,
at the same time, that his rascals -- slaves and soldiers -- had become so
abominably lazy and good-for-nothing of late, that he could not make them
work by ordinary inducements, and did not have the heart to be severe with
them.

The arrangement was agreed to, and the boats were sent and hauled upon the
beach. The crews went to the lava hut, but to their surprise nobody was
there. After waiting till their patience was exhausted, they returned to
the shore, when lo, some stranger --not the Good Samaritan either -- seems
to have very recently passed that way. Three of the boats were broken in a
thousand pieces, and the fourth was missing. By hard toil over the
mountains and through the clinkers, some of the strangers succeeded in
returning to that side of the isle where the ships lay, when fresh boats
are sent to the relief of the rest of the hapless party.

However amazed at the treachery of Oberlus, the two captains, afraid of new
and still more mysterious atrocities -- and indeed, half imputing such
strange events to the enchantments associated with these isles -- perceive
no security but in instant flight, leaving Oberlus and his army in quiet
possession of the stolen boat.

On the eve of sailing they put a letter in a keg, giving the Pacific Ocean
intelligence of the affair, and moored the keg in the bay. Some time
subsequent, the keg was opened by another captain chancing to anchor there,
but not until after he had dispatched a boat round to Oberlus's Landing. As
may be readily surmised, he felt no little inquietude till the boat's
return, when another letter was handed him, giving Oberlus's version of the
affair. This precious document had been found pinned half-mildewed to the
clinker wall of the sulphurous and deserted hut. It ran as follows: showing
that Oberlus was at least an accomplished writer, and no mere boor, and
what is more, was capable of the most tristful eloquence.

"Sir: I am the most unfortunate ill-treated gentleman that lives. I am a
patriot, exiled from my country by the cruel hand of tyranny.

"Banished to these Enchanted Isles, I have again and again besought
captains of ships to sell me a boat, but always have been refused, though I
offered the handsomest prices in Mexican dollars. At length an opportunity
presented of possessing myself of one, and I did not let it slip.

"I have been long endeavoring, by hard labor and much solitary suffering,
to accumulate something to make myself comfortable in a virtuous though
unhappy old age; but at various times have been robbed and beaten by men
professing to be Christians.

"Today I sail from the Enchanted group in the good boat Charity bound to
the Feejee Isles.

"Fatherless Oberlus."

"P.S. -- Behind the clinkers, nigh the oven, you will find the old fowl. Do
not kill it; be patient; I leave it setting; if it shall have any chicks, I
hereby bequeath them to you, whoever you may be. But don't count your
chicks before they are hatched."

The fowl proved a starveling rooster, reduced to a sitting posture by sheer
debility.

Oberlus declares that he was bound to the Feejee Isles; but this was only
to throw pursuers on a false scent. For, after a long time, he arrived,
alone in his open boat, at Guayaquil. As his miscreants were never again
beheld on Hood's Isle, it is supposed, either that they perished for want
of water on the passage to Guayaquil, or, what is quite as probable, were
thrown overboard by Oberlus, when he found the water growing scarce.

From Guayaquil Oberlus proceeded to Payta, and there, with that nameless
witchery peculiar to some of the ugliest animals, wound himself into the
affections of a tawny damsel, prevailing upon her to accompany him back to
his Enchanted Isle; which doubtless he painted as a Paradise of flowers,
not a Tartarus of clinkers.

But unfortunately for the colonization of Hood's Isle with a choice variety
of animated nature, the extraordinary and devilish aspect of Oberlus made
him to be regarded in Payta as a highly suspicious character. So that being
found concealed one night, with matches in his pocket, under the hull of a
small vessel just ready to be launched, he was seized and thrown into jail.

The jails in most South American towns are generally of the least wholesome
sort. Built of huge cakes of sunburnt brick, and containing but one room,
without windows or yard, and but one door heavily grated with wooden bars,
they present both within and without the grimmest aspect. As public
edifices they conspicuously stand upon the hot and dusty Plaza, offering to
view, through the gratings, their villainous and hopeless inmates,
burrowing in all sorts of tragic squalor. And here, for a long time,
Oberlus was seen, the central figure of a mongrel and assassin band, a
creature whom it is religion to detest, since it is philanthropy to hate a
misanthrope.

Note. -- They who may be disposed to question the possibility of the
character above depicted, are referred to the 2d vol. of Porter's Voyage
into the Pacific, where they will recognize many sentences, for
expedition's sake derived verbatim from thence and incorporated here; the
main difference -- save a few passing reflections -- between the two
accounts being that the present writer has added to Porter's facts
accessory ones picked up in the Pacific from reliable sources, and, where
facts conflict, has naturally preferred his own authorities to Porter's.
As, for instance, his authorities place Oberlus on Hood's Isle: Porter's,
on Charles's Isle. The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different,
for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a
certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which
does not adequately appear in Porter's version. I accordingly altered it to
suit the general character of its author.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                Sketch Tenth
             Runaways, Castaways, Solitaries, Gravestones, Etc.

"And all about old stocks and stubs of trees,
Whereon nor fruit nor leaf was ever seen,
Did hang upon ragged knotty knees,
On which had many wretches hanged been."

Some relics of the hut of Oberlus partially remain to this day at the head
of the clinkered valley. Nor does the stranger, wandering among other of
the Enchanted Isles, fail to stumble upon still other solitary abodes, long
abandoned to the tortoise and the lizard. Probably few parts of earth have,
in modern times, sheltered so many solitaries. The reason is that these
isles are situated in a distant sea, and the vessels which occasionally
visit them are mostly all whalers, or ships bound on dreary and protracted
voyages, exempting them in a good degree from both the oversight and the
memory of human law. Such is the character of some commanders and some
seamen that under these untoward circumstances it is quite impossible but
that scenes of unpleasantness and discord should occur between them. A
sullen hatred of the tyrannic ship will seize the sailor, and he gladly
exchanges it for isles, which, though blighted as by a continual sirocco
and burning breeze, still offer him, in their labyrinthine interior, a
retreat beyond the possibility of capture. To flee the ship in any Peruvian
or Chilean port, even the smallest and most rustical, is not unattended
with great risk of apprehension, not to speak of jaguars. A reward of five
pesos sends fifty dastardly Spaniards into the wood, who, with long knives,
scour them day and night in eager hopes of securing their prey. Neither is
it, in general, much easier to escape pursuit at the isles of Polynesia.
Those of them which have felt a civilizing influence present the same
difficulty to the runaway with the Peruvian ports, the advanced natives
being quite as mercenary and keen of knife and scent as the retrograde
Spaniards; while, owing to the bad odor in which all Europeans lie, in the
minds of aboriginal savages who have chanced to hear aught of them, to
desert the ship among primitive Polynesians, is, in most cases, a hope not
unforlorn. Hence the Enchanted Isles become the voluntary tarrying place of
all sorts of refugees; some of whom too sadly experience the fact that
flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a
happy home.

Moreover, it has not seldom happened that hermits have been made upon the
isles by the accidents incident to tortoise hunting. The interior of most
of them is tangled and difficult of passage beyond description; the air is
sultry and stifling; an intolerable thirst is provoked, for which no
running stream offers its kind relief. In a few hours, under an equatorial
sun, reduced by these causes to entire exhaustion, woe betide the straggler
at the Enchanted Isles! Their extent is such as to forbid an adequate
search, unless weeks are devoted to it. The impatient ship waits a day or
two, when, the missing man remaining undiscovered, up goes a stake on the
beach, with a letter of regret, and a keg of crackers and another of water
tied to it, and away sails the craft.

Nor have there been wanting instances where the inhumanity of some captains
has led them to wreak a secure revenge upon seamen who have given their
caprice or pride some singular offense. Thrust ashore upon the scorching
marl, such mariners are abandoned to perish outright, unless by solitary
labors they succeed in discovering some precious dribblets of moisture
oozing from a rock or stagnant in a mountain pool.

I was well acquainted with a man who, lost upon the Isle of Narborough, was
brought to such extremes by thirst that at last he only saved his life by
taking that of another being. A large hair seal came upon the beach. He
rushed upon it, stabbed it in the neck, and then throwing himself upon the
panting body quaffed at the living wound; the palpitations of the
creature's dying heart injected life into the drinker.

Another seaman, thrust ashore in a boat upon an isle at which no ship ever
touched, owing to its peculiar sterility and the shoals about it, and from
which all other parts of the group were hidden -- this man, feeling that it
was sure death to remain there, and that nothing worse than death menaced
him in quitting it, killed two seals, and, inflating their skins, made a
float, upon which he transported himself to Charles's Island, and joined
the republic there.

But men not endowed with courage equal to such desperate attempts find
their only resource in forthwith seeking some watering place, however
precarious or scanty, building a hut, catching tortoises and birds, and in
all respects preparing for a hermit life, till tide or time, or a passing
ship, arrives to float them off.

At the foot of precipices on many of the isles, small rude basins in the
rocks are found, partly filled with rotted rubbish or vegetable decay, or
overgrown with thickets, and sometimes a little moist, which, upon
examination, reveal plain tokens of artificial instruments employed in
hollowing them out, by some poor castaway or still more miserable runaway.
These basins are made in places where it was supposed some scanty drops of
dew might exude into them from the upper crevices.

The relics of hermitages and stone basins are not the only signs of
vanishing humanity to be found upon the isles. And, curious to say, that
spot which of all others in settled communities is most animated, at the
Enchanted Isles presents the most dreary of aspects. And though it may seem
very strange to talk of post offices in this barren region, yet post
offices are occasionally to be found there. They consist of a stake and a
bottle. The letters being not only sealed, but corked. They are generally
deposited by captains of Nantucketers for the benefit of passing fishermen,
and contain statements as to what luck they had in whaling or tortoise
hunting. Frequently, however, long months and months, whole years, glide by
and no applicant appears. The stake rots and falls, presenting no very
exhilarating object.

If now it be added that gravestones, or rather graveboards, are also
discovered upon some of the isles, the picture will be complete.

Upon the beach of James's Isle, for many years was to be seen a rude
fingerpost, pointing inland. And, perhaps, taking it for some signal of
possible hospitality in this otherwise desolate spot -- some good hermit
living there with his maple dish -- the stranger would follow on in the
path thus indicated, till at last he would come out in a noiseless nook and
find his only welcome, a dead man -- his sole greeting the inscription over
a grave. Here, in 1813, fell, in a daybreak duel, a lieutenant of the U.S.
frigate Essex, aged twenty-one -- attaining his majority in death.

It is but fit that, like those old monastic institutions of Europe whose
inmates go not out of their own walls to be inurned but are entombed there
where they die, the Encantadas, too, should bury their own dead, even as
the great general monastery of earth does hers.

It is known that burial in the ocean is a pure necessity of seafaring life,
and that it is only done when land is far astern, and not clearly visible
from the bow. Hence, to vessels cruising in the vicinity of the Enchanted
Isles, they afford a convenient Potter's Field. The interment over, some
good-natured forecastle poet and artist seizes his paint brush and
inscribes a doggerel epitaph. When, after a long lapse of time, other
good-natured seamen chance to come upon the spot, they usually make a table
of the mound, and quaff a friendly can to the poor soul's repose.

As a specimen of these epitaphs, take the following, found in a bleak gorge
of Chatham Isle:

"Oh, Brother Jack, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
Just so game, and just so gay,
But now, alack, they've stopped my pay.
No more I peep out of my blinkers,
Here I be -- tucked in with clinkers!"
