Our life was one of perpetual exposure and daily activity. Though overpoweringly hot at noon, the atmosphere of the morning and evening was delightful; and as these portions of the day were spent in hunting for food, the time passed rapidly; but Hislop's chief fear was, that if we were not taken off by some ship before the rainy season set in, our discomforts and danger from agues would become very great.
By the time we had been fourteen days on the island, he was recovered so far as to be able to join me in making an exploration of it, or rather in walking all round it.
The circumference of the largest isle is only four leagues; but its shores are so steep and rocky in some places, that traversing them proved a most arduous task.
On the eastern side we found a great cascade pouring from a brow of rock upon the beach. The latter was covered almost everywhere by a broad-leaved seaweed, the dark and slimy tendrils of which were several yards in length, and were termed by Hislop "the gigantic fucus."
So day after day passed, and amid our various means of procuring food, we never failed to keep a keen look-out to seaward for a passing sail; but none came near that lonely islet of the southern sea.
One morning I found there had drifted ashore near our hut a mass of that mysterious substance, the origin of which has puzzled so many naturalists—ambergris. It must have weighed more than a hundred pounds in weight; and and when we threw some of it into the fire, it melted and diffused around a most agreeable perfume. This marine production, which is only to be found in the seas or on the shores of Africa and Brazil, is alleged by some to be a concretion formed in the stomach of the spermaceti whale.
On the fifteenth morning after our landing, a seaman named Henry Warren, who went to milk our goats, which had been tethered to a large tree near the hut, returned in haste to announce that the ropes which had secured them were cut, apparently by a sharp instrument—cut clean through—and that the goats, the capture of which had cost us so much labor, were gone.
"Cut? By whom?" asked every one.
Before we had time to consider this, Hislop came out of the hut, and stated that one of our three bread bags had also been cut open, by a slash from a knife apparently, and that several pounds of biscuit had been abstracted.
The strange alarm, and what was worse, the doubt of each other, which these discoveries excited, were painful and bewildering.