Floyd awoke shortly after sunup.
The gulls were shouting and flying against the blaze of the sunrise, fleeting like snowflakes across the blue sky beyond the reef opening, and fishing at the pierheads.
When the great lagoon was emptying or filling to the tide, the water at the pierheads went like a mill race; at slack water it lay gently flowing to the swell of the outside sea as now.
Floyd came from under the tent, glanced round him, stretched himself, and then crossed the reef to the outer beach, where the breakers were coming in—the eternal breakers of the Pacific, leisurely, monotonous, rhythmical, filling the air with their sound and spindrift, their ozone and life.
Nothing could be more extraordinary than the contrast between the inner beach and the outer beach of the island. You stood now facing a great lake, calm and colored with all the blues and greens of tropical water that varies in depth, and now, crossing the reef, you stood on the shore of a thunderous sea.
Floyd stripped himself of his clothes and went into the surf. When he had bathed and dried himself in the sun, he returned to the camp, where he found Schumer lighting the fire and Isbel preparing breakfast. They greeted him and he fell to to help.
He felt for the moment gay; the brightness, the sense of early morning, the sea breeze and the crying gulls all raised his spirits to the highest pitch.
Even Schumer, older and unenthusiastic to everything but trade, seemed more cheerful than usual.
"We'll take the boat now," said he, when breakfast was finished, "and prospect the lagoon. We want to get soundings, anyhow, in case a ship should come and may want anchorage inside. This island isn't charted—at least it's not on the British admiralty charts. I have the Tonga charts in the tent, and they make it all clear water from the spot where the hurricane took us to three hundred miles south, and we didn't run more than a hundred and fifty before we tripped over the reef.
"South of the three-hundred-mile limit there's a group of small islands, but they are not atolls. Now we're clear out of trade tracks and unknown, though you may be sure whalers have been here, for there's nowhere in the Pacific that whalers haven't pushed their noses, and whalers are useless to us. We don't want any blubber tanks showing their dirty hulls here; if they took us aboard they would drop us again at any decent port till after, maybe, a three years' cruise, and then they'd land us God knows where, crippled with work and tuppence in our pockets. No, sir, if any dirty whalers show their faces here they'll get bullets before they get us on board. Well, come on and help float the boat."