for
a solitary human being to be cast away upon. It was composed,
apparently, of nothing but coral, upon which the everlasting surf was
gradually casting up a deposit of sand, which, when dry, the wind was as
gradually distributing over its surface. Here and there I observed dark
patches which I took to be seaweed, partly buried in the sand; and there
was a tolerably well defined tide-mark, consisting apparently of more
seaweed, and flotsam of various kinds cast up by the surf.

But the most remarkable thing about the island was the multitude of
birds, gulls principally. There were thousands of them in the air about
the reef, and many more thousands of them sitting on the reef itself.
The time was no doubt coming when the guano of these birds, their dead
bodies, and the refuse of their food, mingling and agglomerating with
the sand and rotting seaweed, would form an extraordinarily rich soil,
upon which a few coconuts, drifting across the illimitable ocean, would
be cast up by the surf, and, becoming buried, would sprout, throw out
roots and shoots, and become trees, as has happened in the case of so
many others of the Pacific islands. But at that moment there was not a
green thing upon it.

The atoll, as a whole, was almost perfectly circular in shape, having a
diameter of about four miles; and for purposes of description it may be
spoken of as consisting of three parts, namely, the island, the lagoon,
and the encircling reef. The island, which, being dry, was of course
the highest part of the atoll, measured about three and a quarter miles
long, and was crescent-shaped, being about three-eighths of a mile wide
in the middle, tapering off north and south in the form of the cusps of
the crescent moon; and from the extremities of the two cusps there swept
away the encircling reef which enclosed the lagoon in a very perfect
natural breakwater, having the inevitable opening as nearly as might be
in its middle, just opposite the widest part of the island. But
although I have spoken of the island as being the highest part, it must
not be supposed that even this rose any considerable height above the
level of the ocean, its highest point, as we subsequently ascertained,
being only a bare six feet above the water's surface.

I was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the passage through the
reef almost immediately after going aloft; we therefore had no
difficulty in hitting it off, and, conning the schooner from the