tons of
stores among the gulls and mews of a half-sunken reef; she had had an
affair with the unruly natives of the Walker Group, and had blown a
village to fragments, and not a few of the Walkers themselves into a
land as uncharted as their own; she had tried a beach-comber for
murder, and had dangled him at the main yardarm, giving him later on a
Church of England service, a hammock, and the use of a cannon ball at
his feet; she had poked her nose into cannibal bays, where women of wild
beauty and wilder license swam off to the ship in hundreds until the
marines drove them back with muskets, and fired at their own comrades,
who in their madness leaped into the water and were floated ashore in
the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls,
where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save
for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of
turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine
seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death
always close aboard.

It was morning when Hadow raised the island, a fleecy speck of cloud
against the sky line, and he shortened sail at once and lingered out the
day so as to bring him up to it by dark. After supper every light on
board was doused, and the great hull, gliding through the glass-smooth
water, merged her steep sides and towering yards and canvas into the
universal shadow. With whispering keel and a wind so fair and soft that
one wondered to see the sails stiffen in the bolt ropes, the man-of-war
stole steadily to leeward, with no sound but the occasional creak of
cordage, or the hoarse murmur of voices from the lower deck. Hadow
himself, pacing the quarter-deck in his boat cloak, was lost in reverie,
while the wardroom and the steerage in unredeemed darkness held nothing
but dozing men.

By ten the ship was hove to close ashore, and the lights of the little
settlement glimmered through the palms. The warm night, laden with
exotic fragrance and strangely exciting in the intensity of its
stillness and beauty, hid beneath its far-reaching pall the various
actors of an extraordinary drama. With pistols buckled to their hips,
Brady, Winterslea, Hotham, and Stanbury-Jones, four officers of the
ship, together with Hatch, a flinty-faced old seaman who could be
trusted, all slipped down the ladder into the captain's gig and pulled
with muffled oars for the break in the reef.