"Yes, and the Lovey Susan," says he, "she went to the bottom, and her name was soft enough, and I don't believe any boat with the name Esperanza would ever have the strength to ride through a storm. I likes a plain straightforward name, I do, like my own; you won't find any man," says he, "with a better name than Billy Bobbin."
"Well, shall we call her Billy?" I asked.
Billy looked very serious at this, and after considering for a minute he said he wasn't going to be called a "her" or a "she" for anybody, not even on a boat, and then added, "Call her plain Hope and settle it, master, and never mind about your Esperanzas."
"Fair Hope would suit a lady better than Plain Hope," I said very gravely, and Billy, who was quite unconscious of the verbal point ('twas a very small one, I own), agreed that Fair Hope wasn't bad; and so we got some powdered charcoal and mixed it with oil, and printed the name in black letters on the larboard bow, as Billy called it, and having done this, we thought we might now venture to make a short expedition up the coast.
We go Sailing
It was a fair bright morning when we set out on this our first voyage, and we were very much excited, as you may imagine. We had been by my reckoning, which was pure guess-work, above two years on the island, and though we had become pretty reconciled to it, regarding it indeed as our home for the rest of our lives, there were times when our lot seemed to be that of prisoners, and the prospect of getting beyond our bounds, though ever so short a distance and for ever so short a time, seemed like the loosening of fetters and the removing of prison bars. This made me think what a blessed thing is liberty, and when I remembered unfortunate people whom I had read about as falling into captivity I compared our lot with theirs, and saw how much we had to be thankful for.
However, to return to our voyage. We had been taught a certain caution by sundry incidents that had already happened in our life on the island, so we put some food and two or three pots of fresh water in the bottom of the vessel, and our spears, axes, and bows and arrows as well. While Billy carried these things down to the vessel, I went up to our watch-tower, to see whether any canoes were in sight, for we should have been very sorry if we had run among a fleet of savage vessels. However, there was not a speck to be seen, only the low dusky line on the western horizon that we believed to be the coast of some island. Accordingly we set off in perfect ease of mind, and paddled slowly along, keeping close to the shore, and following its indentations as well as the rocks and shoals would permit us.
The seaward aspect of the familiar parts of the island was very interesting to us, and we amused ourselves with guessing what places in the interior were opposite to us when the cliffs hid them from sight. For some distance we passed beneath low cliffs; then the shore took a great curve inward, making the bay we had called by Billy's name; the head of this bay we judged to be the point of the shore nearest to our hut, which was not itself visible from any part of the sea, lying as it did in a hollow. We paddled out to the nearest of the big rocks that stood like sentinels guarding this side of the island, and found a great quantity of clams upon it, some of which Billy insisted on taking into the boat, to see if they tasted any different from those we found on our own shore, and in reaching over he pretty nearly upset the vessel. From thence we went on to the second rock, some little distance out to sea, and Billy wanted to get out and climb the rock, which stood almost perpendicular, but with jagged sides, so that climbing was possible; but the base of it was so thickly covered with slimy seaweed that it would have been difficult to maintain a footing, so I persuaded Billy to forego the enterprise. Leaving this rock, we continued on our course, and came by and by to the rocky spar that was what may be called the land's end of this part of the island. Here the cliffs were very steep, indeed, almost perpendicular, as we had discovered before when we had tried to walk round the coast, and found our way blocked. When we had turned the corner, we found another little bay, but no beach, except a very small strip of sand at the foot of the cliffs. We saw a great quantity of driftwood on this beach, and when we paddled up to it, a huge eel darted away from beneath a water-sodden log, on which Billy made a great lamentation because we had not brought our fishing lines and hooks. Among the driftwood we saw two or three very old planks, worm-eaten and covered with moss, and we wondered whether they were planks of the boat of the Lovey Susan, which we might have had now if we had been more thoughtful. We took them on board, not that they would be of any use to us, but that we might keep them as mementoes.
The Cave
Paddling out of this bay, we were coasting along by more high cliffs when we came all of a sudden to an immense opening, which appeared to run a great way into the shore, though we could not tell how far, for its depths were very black.