We used soundings while skirting the dangerous shoal known as Compan's Bank, over which it is alleged a famous buccaneer, named Nicholas Compan, sailed his galley; and by sunset the Cape de Verd was far astern, and nothing but the blue sea around us again; for now that wondrous shore receded eastward, far away toward the mouth of the Senegal.
CHAPTER L.
SANTA CRUZ.
A few days after crossing the tropic of Cancer, on a lovely afternoon, we again saw the Peak of Teneriffe lighted up by the western sunshine, and rising like a cone of red flame from the blue sea.
The clouds seemed to rise with it, and ere long we saw its base spreading out beneath them.
"Tennyreef again!" I heard old Tom Lambourne muttering, as he leaned over the lee bow with a short pipe in his mouth; "Dash my wig! I have had a spell enough of Tennyreef before this!"
Manuel Gautier and Hislop now came with a party of seamen to get the anchors off the forecastle to her bows. This was no light task, the reader may be assured, for they were each about forty-five hundred weight; and now the ponderous cables rattled along the deck as they were bent to the iron rings.
We approached this singular island from a point that was new to me; but still its great and most familiar features were the same as when I first saw them from the deck of the Eugenie.
Estremera now reminded us that, when at Teneriffe, we should not fail to visit the two great sights of the island—the Valley of the Diamond and the old Dragon-tree of Caora.
The wind was fresh and fair, but fell light after sunset; and when the high land of the Grand Canary was on our starboard beam, it almost died away. As we crept on we saw the lighthouse at the base of La Montana Roxo, sparkling like a star above the waves of the sea, which in the warm sunset seemed to have turned into blood or port-wine, so deeply crimson was the glow that lingered on the clouds and on the shore; and then the vast peak—save where girdled in mid air by a light floating vapor—seemed all of a deep violet tint, dotted at its base by the white walls of houses, or of sugar-mills, and by groves of cocoa and rosewood trees.