This discovery was made barely in time to enable me to jam my helm hard-a-starboard and just fetch the opening, through which in about five minutes afterwards we gently slid, finding ourselves in the midst of a deep basin of almost perfect circular form, so completely landlocked and with such a narrow and artfully-concealed entrance that it was not until we were within a biscuit-throw of the rocks that I felt absolutely certain there really existed a passage at all.
The basin, as I have already said, was of circular form, and I judged it to be about a mile in diameter. The entrance was at the most northerly point in its circumference; at which spot, as I afterwards ascertained by sounding, there was nearly forty fathoms of water, though the horns or cusps of the encircling cliffs approached each other so closely that it would have been impossible to take even a small square-rigged vessel through without bracing her yard sharp fore and aft, and a craft of say a couple of hundred tons could not have been carried through at all.
At the entrance the cliffs rose almost perpendicularly out of the water, both outside and inside, terminating in a wedge on either side.
From this point, however, they gradually widened away in the form of a gently-rising plateau, out of which two spurs of the mountain sprang, one on each side of the basin.
Between these spurs or shoulders lay a ravine, which sloped evenly down from the level of the plateau on each side until it terminated, at the southern extremity of the basin, in a beach of fine sand. This ravine lay, of course, directly ahead of us as we entered; and its smooth, lawn-like surface, swelling gradually upwards towards the mountain in the rear and the plateaus on each side, formed a truly lovely picture under any circumstances, and especially to us who had, within the last hour, been battling with a stormy sea.
Its central portion, for perhaps a mile in length and a quarter of that width, was luxuriantly clothed with the freshest verdure, but was quite destitute of trees.
Beyond these limits, however, the whole face of the country was thickly-wooded, cocoa-nuts and bananas being conspicuously abundant. The beach ran about three-fourths round the basin, being broadest immediately in front of the ravine, and gradually narrowing away to nothing at about a mile’s distance on either side.
At the western extremity of the beach a beautiful cascade tumbled over the edge of the cliff upon a low rocky platform below, from whence it dispersed itself into the sea.
I took the glass, and carefully swept the entire ravine with it to ascertain whether there were any indications that the island was inhabited, for I felt convinced that were it so this lovely spot would be the first selected as a place of abode. But for all that I could see no human foot had ever pressed the soil, and I felt encouraged to go close in and anchor; though, before doing anything else, I determined to make a voyage of discovery inland, and settle the question as to the existence or non-existence of inhabitants.
If it should really prove that we had this lovely island all to ourselves, nothing could possibly be better suited to our purpose of careening the cutter: for I found, by repeated casts of the lead, that the water shoaled with almost mathematical regularity as we approached the beach.