We soon made out distinctly that it was a large island. The shore was somewhat level to the north-east, and in the centre towered an almost perpendicular mountain of vast height, the sides of which seemed covered with furze, gorse, and brushwood.
Elsewhere its dusky and copper-colored rocks started sheer out of the sea, whose waters formed a zone of snow-white surf around their base.
We headed the boat to the north-east, where the shore seemed more approachable, and as we pulled along it, but keeping fully three miles off, when the land opened, we saw high crags, deep ravines, shady woods and dells in the interior, though no appearance of houses, of wigwams, or of inhabitants.
Many speculations were now ventured as to what island this might be.
"May it not be land that has never before been discovered?" I suggested with a glow of pleasure, in the anticipation of being among the first to tread an unexplored and hitherto unknown shore. Hislop smiled and shook his head.
Henry Warren, who had been an old South-sea whaler, suggested that it was the island Grando, but Hislop assured us that this was impossible. In the first place, by the position of the sun, he could see that we were not so far south as the parallel of Port San Giorgio on the Brazilian shore; and in the second, the existence of such an island was doubted.
"Can it be Trinidad Island—Tristan da Cunha, or the Rocks of Martin Vaz?" asked Tom Lambourne.
"If the latter," replied Hislop, "we should now be in south latitude 20° 27', but this land in no way answers to the aspect of the Martin Vaz Rocks."
"Did you ever see them, sir?" asked several.
"No; but they are described by La Perouse as appearing like five distinct headlands." After pausing and pondering for a moment, he suddenly added, with confidence, "It is the Island of Alphonso de Albuquerque!"