is
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 sank, 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 further 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 vessel or owner; nor were there any names marked or cut on the
boards, as