upon a
sheltered beach.

I seated myself upon the sofa locker, and strove to recall mentally the
features of the several rivers that we had visited, but could fit none
of them to the dimly-seen surroundings that were visible from the port
out of which I had looked. The one thing which was certain was that we
were in perfectly smooth water, and the entire absence of shock with
which the ship had taken the ground was an indication that she was
certainly in no immediate danger; but beyond that the situation was
puzzling in the extreme. The snug and sheltered position of the ship
pointed strongly to the assumption that we had blundered into some river
in the darkness; yet when I again looked out through the port the little
that I was able to see was suggestive of beach rather than river, and
that we were not very far from a beach was evidenced by the loud,
unbroken roar of the surf. Then there was the puzzling question: How
did we get where we were? What were the look-outs doing? What was
everybody doing that no one saw the land or heard the roar of the surf
in time to avoid running the ship ashore?

As I continued to stare abstractedly out through the port it struck me
that the various objects within sight were growing more clearly visible,
and presently I felt convinced that the dawn was approaching. And at
the same moment I became aware that a broad dark shadow that lay some
fifty yards from the ship's starboard side, and which had been puzzling
me greatly, was a sandbank of very considerable extent, so considerable,
indeed, that, for the moment, I could not make out where it terminated.
Meanwhile the hubbub on deck gradually ceased, and I surmised that the
canvas had been taken in.

The transition from the first pallor of dawn to full daylight is very
rapid in those low latitudes, and within ten minutes of the first faint
heralding of day a level shaft of sunlight shot athwart the scene, which
became in a moment transfigured, and all that had before been vague and
illusory stood frankly revealed to the eye. The sandbank now showed as
an isolated patch about two hundred yards wide and perhaps half a mile
long, with what looked like a by-wash channel of about one hundred yards
wide flowing between it and the mainland, the latter being a sandy beach
backed by sand dunes clothed with a rank creeper-like vegetation, and a
few stunted tree tops showing behind them. As the ship then lay with
her head pointing toward