The hands who had come off in the boat dined on board, and then the doctor, taking with him those who were going to stay on shore, pulled back to the bay, to commence his duties as Governor of Trinidad, leaving me with my two hands, Wright, and the coloured man Spanner. And a very good governor the doctor proved too, as I discovered when I next went on shore and saw the work that had been got through. He kept up a discipline quite strict enough for all practical purposes. He did more work than anyone else himself, being physically the strongest man of us all, and he superintended all the operations with great skill and judgment. The control could not have been left in better hands, and he was well backed up by his comrades. There was hard work done on that island, considerable hardships were undergone, there was often dangerous landing and beaching of boats, and all was carried on under a vertical sun on one of the hottest and most depressing spots on earth. Great credit is due to the doctor and the others who worked so hard and with such pluck and cheerful zeal, and the ungenerous remarks of the one discontented volunteer we had left—a man who did not do his share of work either at sea or on shore, but who did far more than his share of criticism and faultfinding—can only reflect upon himself. As he has favoured the world with his sneers through the medium of the papers, I feel bound to say this much.
The doctor remained and worked hard on the island during the whole time that our operations were being carried on, as did Powell and Pursell, and they, with the paid hands, who relieved each other at intervals, practically did all the digging. I was on shore for one fortnight only, as will appear in the course of this narrative. I had, consequently, but a very small share of the hard work and of roughing it, for the life on board ship was incomparably more comfortable and easy than the life on shore. Our critical volunteer also only passed about two weeks, of not arduous work, on the island; for the rest of the time he was on the yacht.
This night we had another local storm, but by now we were getting accustomed to this.
Shortly after dawn on the following morning, Sunday, December 1, I saw, to my surprise, the whaleboat rounding the point. She came alongside, and the doctor, who was in charge of her boarded us. Seeing that there was very little surf in Southwest Bay, he had rightly taken the opportunity of putting off for another cargo of stores. Among other articles, he carried away some large coconut mats we had purchased at Bahia, and which, when laid on the sandy floor of the tents, would make things more comfortable. He also took off the heavy boiler and receiving tank of the condensing apparatus, which could only be landed on a favourable day such as this was. Having loaded the boat, he left us again.
We had now taken so much weight out of the yacht that she was high out of the water, and might possibly prove somewhat cranky under canvas. So, after dinner, I took the two men off with me in the dinghy, for the purpose of fetching some heavy stones from the beach, to put in our hold in the place of all the tools we had taken out. First we pulled to the pier, where we landed without the slightest difficulty. Wright, while wandering about the beach, came across the last object one would expect to find on a desert island—a rather smart lady’s straw-hat, so far as my judgment goes, of modern fashion. It had, probably, been blown off some fair head on a passenger steamer. The gallant gentlemen-adventurers, when they heard of this discovery, proposed that it should be stuck on a pole in the middle of the camp, to remind them of home and beauty.
Finding that there were no suitable stones near this beach, we got in the boat again and rowed to West Bay, to see if we should have better luck there. Three islets lie off the east side of the Ness. We found that the narrow deep-water channel between these and the cape could be taken with safety on a fine day like this. As a rule, this channel is impracticable, for the ocean swell penetrating it produces a great commotion, the sea being dashed with violence from the cliffs on one side to those on the other, so that the entire channel presents the appearance of a boiling cauldron; and, even on this quiet day, we had to keep the boat carefully in the middle, for the waves leapt high up the rocky walls with a loud noise, which was repeated in manifold echoes by the crags above. When we were in the passage between the third islet and the shore the scene before us was most impressive. The black cliffs rose perpendicularly on either side of us, about thirty feet apart, casting a profound shade on the heaving water, so that it looked like ink beneath us; and between these cliffs, as through a dark tunnel, we saw the sunlit waters and shores of West Bay. The mountains that lay to the back of it were barren and of bold outline, great pinnacles of rock dominating huge landslips that slope to the shingle-beach. We could distinguish the familiar forms of the Sugarloaf and Noah’s Ark towering over the depressions of the hills.
At the farther end of the bay we found a suitable place for getting stones. Here a rocky shelf formed a sort of jetty. George leapt on shore and brought down the stones, while Wright, sitting in the stern, took them from him, and placed them at the bottom of the
