oduce nothing which could have added
to our comfort, while delay would only have uselessly consumed our
provisions. There did not appear to be a living creature on the island,
and the danger of approaching to find a landing-place was most imminent.

This unpromising appearance induced me to propose that we should
continue our course to Rio Janeiro. The men were of another opinion.
They said they had been too long afloat, cooped up, and that they should
prefer remaining on the island to risking their lives any longer in so
frail a boat on the wide ocean. We were still debating, when we came to
a small spot of sand on which we discovered two wild hogs, which we
conjectured had come down to feed on the shell fish; this decided them,
and I consented to run to leeward of the island, and seek for a
landing-place. We sounded the west end, following the remarks of
Horsburgh, and ran for the cove of the Nine-Pin Rock. As we opened it,
a scene of grandeur presented itself, which we had never met with
before, and which in its kind is probably unrivalled in nature. An
enormous rock rose, nearly perpendicularly, out of the sea, to the
height of nine hundred or one thousand feet. It was as narrow at the
base as it was at the top, and was formed exactly in the shape of a
nine-pin, from which it derives its name. The sides appeared smooth and
even to the top, which was covered with verdure, and was so far above us
that the sea-birds, which in myriads screamed around it, were scarcely
visible two-thirds of the way up. The sea beat violently against its
base--the feathered tribe, in endless variety, had been for ages the
undisturbed tenants of this natural monument; all its jutting points and
little projections were covered with their white dung, and it seemed to
me a wonderful effort of nature which had placed this mass in the
position which it held in spite of the utmost efforts of the winds and
waves of the wide ocean.

Another curious phenomenon appeared at the other end of the cove. The
lava had poured down into the sea, and formed a stratum; a second river
of fused rock had poured again over the first, and had cooled so rapidly
as to hang suspended, not having joined the former strata, but leaving a
vacuum between for the water to fill up. The sea dashed violently
between the two beds, and spouted magnificently through holes in the
upper bed of lava to the height of sixty feet, resembling much the
spouting of a whale, b