The shortness of our stay on this coast, and the difficulty we experienced in communicating with the inhabitants, will account for the scanty and disjointed nature of the information obtained. A future voyager would do well to be accompanied by a person who can write the Chinese character, and should have full leisure to overcome, by patient management, the distrust of strangers evinced by this unsociable people.
A chart of our track along this coast is subjoined to this work, in the hope that it may prove useful to a future voyager. As it was constructed under circumstances of great haste, it is necessarily incomplete; yet it will probably be found more accurate than any maps or charts hitherto published.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: A servant of the embassy, left behind by accident at the
Pei-ho river.]
[Footnote 2: We found the north-east end composed of a fine-grained granite; the middle of the island of a brittle micaceous schistus of a deep blue colour; the strata are nearly horizontal, but dip a little to the S.W. This body of strata is cut across by a granite dyke, at some places forty feet wide, at others not above ten; the strata in the vicinity of the dyke are broken and bent in a remarkable manner; this dislocation and contortion does not extend far from the walls of the dyke, but veins of granite branch out from it to a great distance, varying in width from three feet to the hundredth part of an inch: the dyke is visible from the top of the cliff to the water's edge, but does not re-appear on the corresponding cliff of an island opposite to it, though distant only thirty yards. This island is composed of the same schistus, and is cut in a vertical direction by a whin dyke, four feet wide, the planes of whose sides lie N.E. and S.W., being at right angles to those of the great granite dyke in the neighbourhood, which run S.E. and N.W. The strata contiguous to the whin dyke are a good deal twisted and broken, but not in the same degree as at their contact with the granite dyke.
The whin dyke is formed of five layers or sets of prisms laid across in the usual way. Beyond the small island cut by the whin dyke, at the distance of only forty or fifty feet, we came to an island rising abruptly out of the sea, and presenting a high rugged cliff of breccia, fronting that on which the granite dyke is so conspicuous: the junction of this rock with the schistus cut by the granite and the whin would have been interesting; but although we must have been at times within a few yards of it, the actual contact was every where hid by the sea.
The whole of the S.W. end of this island is formed of breccia, being an assemblage of angular and water-worn pieces of schistus, quartz, and some other rocks, the whole having the appearance of a great shingle beach. The fragments of the schistus in this rock are similar to that which forms the cliff first spoken of.
The theory which presented itself to us on the spot was, that the great mass of strata which forms the centre of the island was formerly at the bottom of the ocean; and that the western part, which is now a firm breccia, had been a beach shingle produced by the action of the waves on the strata: the granite which forms the eastern end of the island had been forced into its present situation from beneath the strata, with sufficient violence to dislocate and contort the beds nearest to it, and to inject the liquid granite into the rents formed by the heaving action of the strata as they were raised up. It is natural to suppose that the ragged edges of the strata forming the sides of these cracks would be subjected to a grinding action, from which the strata more remote might be exempted; and in this way we may account for the extraordinary twisting, and separation of masses along the whole course of the granite dyke. In the dyke, as well as in the veins which branch from it, there are numerous islands of schistus. That this last was softened, seems to follow from the frequent instances which occur of its being bent back upon itself without producing cracks. The same heat, propagated by the melted granite in the neighbourhood, may also be supposed to have reduced the shingle beach to a state of semifusion by the aid of some flux contained in the sand scattered amongst it. We could not discover any circumstance by which the relative antiquity of the two dykes mentioned above, could be ascertained.]
[Footnote 3: Note on the peculiar character of the written language in that quarter of the globe.
In China, Japan, Corea, and the islands in the adjacent seas, the spoken languages are different from one another; the written language, on the contrary, is the same in all. Thus a native of China is unintelligible to a Corean or Japanese, while he is speaking, but they mutually understand one another when their thoughts are expressed in writing. The cause of this may be thus explained. We in Europe form an idea in the mind, and this we express by certain sounds, which differ in different countries; these sounds are committed to writing by means of the letters of the alphabet, which are only symbols of sounds, and, consequently, a writing in Europe is unintelligible to every one who is ignorant of the spoken language in which it happens to be written. The Chinese and the other natives in these seas have, on the contrary, no alphabet; no symbols of sounds; their ideas are committed to writing at once without the intervention of sound, and their characters may therefore be called symbols of ideas. Now, as the same characters are adopted in all these countries to express the same ideas, it is clear that their writings will be perfectly intelligible to each other, although their spoken languages may be quite incomprehensible.