In this first moment of leisure I instinctively turned, as did virtually every man aboard ship, to look for the sail that had been reported to the north of us. But although we looked long and anxiously, we saw no sail, no trace of any floating craft. It had disappeared during the squall, utterly and completely. Only the wild dark sea and the wild succession of mountain piled on mountain met our searching eyes.
A sail there had been, beyond all question, where now there was none.
Driven by the storm, it had vanished completely from our sight.
As well as we could judge by our lunar observations, the land was between Paga River and Stony Point, and when we had sailed along some forty miles, the shore, as it should be according to our reckoning, was less mountainous.
It was my first glimpse of the Sunda Islands, of which I had heard so much, and I well remember that I stood by the forward rigging watching the distant land from where it seemed on my right to rise from the sea, to where it seemed on my left to go down beyond the horizon into the sea again, and that I murmured to myself in a small, awed voice:—
"This is Java!"
The very name had magic in it. Already from those islands our Salem mariners had accumulated great wealth. Not yet are the old days forgotten, when Elias Hasket Derby's ships brought back fortunes from Batavia, and when Captain Carnes, by one voyage in Jonathan Peele's schooner Rajah to the northern coast of Sumatra for wild pepper, made a profit of seven hundred per cent of both the total cost of the schooner itself and the whole expense of the entire expedition. I who lived in the exhilarating atmosphere of those adventurous times was thrilled to the heart by my first sight of lands to which hundreds of Salem ships had sailed.
It really was Java, and night was falling on its shores. Far to the northeast some tiny object pricked above the skyline, and a point of light gleamed clearly, low against the blue heavens in which the stars had just begun to shine.
"A sail!" I cried.
Before the words had left my lips a deep voice aloft sonorously proclaimed:—
"Sa-a-ail ho!"