ntil he came to the breakers on the beach,
through which he could not force his way; for the moment he touched
the ground with his foot, the recoil of the sea, and what is called by
sailors the undertow, carried him back again, and left him in the rear
of the last wave.

Three times the brave fellow made the attempt, and with the same
result. At last he sunk, and we pulled him in very nearly dead. We,
however, restored him by care and attention, and he went again to his
usual duty. The midshipman now proposed that he should try to swim
through the surf without the line, for that alone had impeded the
progress of the quarter-master; this was true, but I would not allow
him to run the risk, and we pulled along shore, until we came to
a rock on which the surf beat very high, and which we avoided in
consequence. This rock we discovered to be detached from the main; and
within it, to our great joy, we saw smooth water; we pulled in, and
succeeded in landing without much difficulty, and having secured
our boat to a grapnel, and left two trusty men in charge of her,
I proceeded with the rest to explore the cove; our attention was
naturally first directed to the wreck which we had passed in the boat,
and, after a quarter of an hour's scrambling over huge fragments of
broken rocks, which had been detached from the sides of the hill, and
encumbered the beach, we arrived at the spot.

The wreck proved to be a beautiful copper-bottomed schooner, of about
a hundred and eighty tons burthen. She had been dashed on shore with
great violence, and thrown many yards above the high-water mark. Her
masts and spars were lying in all directions on the beach, which
was strewed with her cargo. This consisted of a variety of toys
and hardware, musical instruments, violins, flutes, fifes, and
bird-organs. Some few remains of books, which I picked up, were French
romances, with indelicate plates, and still worse text. These proved
the vessel to be French. At a short distance from the wreck, on a
rising knoll, we found three or four huts, rudely constructed out of
the fragments; and, a little farther off, a succession of graves, each
surmounted with a cross. I examined the huts, which contained some
rude and simple relics of human tenancy: a few benches and tables,
composed of boards roughly hewn out and nailed together; bones of
goats, and of the wild hog, with the remains of burnt wood. But we
could not discover any traces of the name of the ve