When consciousness returned, I felt on my face the warmth of a hot sunshine, and my first impulse was to strike out and swim, as if still in the ocean. Then starting convulsively, I rose slowly and giddily to find that I had been lying on a dry shingly beach, about two yards from the verge of the sea, which was calm as a mirror, and rippled like an inland lake upon "the unnumbered pebbles" and thick layers of beautiful shells that lay along this unknown shore.
Behind me rose steep black rocks, covered with green waving woods that fringed their summits, and close by lay the spar, by clinging to which my life had probably been saved. A few tortoises were crawling near it, on the shingle. After pausing to rally thought and power of action, I started to my feet, and looked around me. My clothes, a uniform coat and blue pantaloons with Hessian boots, were still moist with my recent immersion; but the saline property of the sea water prevented it from causing ague or other illness.
By the sun's altitude, I judged the time to be about ten in the morning; for my watch had stopped soon after I had been precipitated from the mizen rattlins into the sea.
The rays were scorching now, and they shone with a glitter and brilliance upon the grey rocks and palmetto groves above me, and with a transparency, which, by making them appear to vibrate, gave an idea of the heat being almost visible. At a little distance, some monkeys of the smallest size with long bushy tails were skipping about, and I saw the gaily-pinioned flamingoes flitting from branch to branch; but near me there was no sound, save the gurgling ripple on the beach—not even the hum of the smallest insect.
Far away to the vast circle of the horizon, stretched the ocean in profound calm. Its waters were of the lightest blue, and no spot or sail appeared upon their glassy and glowing surface.
Thirst now oppressed me, but I drank greedily of a pure, cool spring, that trickled down a chasm in the rocks, and then thought of looking about for the nearest habitation, I cared not whether it proved French or English; though I had some dread of falling among the revolted slaves of either nation, or the wild Caribs, the aborigines of the Indian isles.
I found myself in a kind of creek, from which there was no way of egress, but by climbing up the cliffs inland, as the rocks descended sheer into the water, like ramparts of basalt; so grasping the mangroves, the wild gourds, vines, and other luxuriant creepers which covered the face of the cliffs, I began to ascend from the shore.
I had scarcely attained an altitude of thirty yards or so, when I found my feet entangled in what I conceived to be the dried branches of a tree. After kicking vigorously, on looking down, imagine my sensations on finding that I had hurled from a shelf of the rock the bleached remains of a human skeleton!
This in no way cheerful episode, gave me fresh energy; and I soon gained the summit of the cliff, which was about a hundred and sixty feet high, and proved to be the most lofty eminence in the isle—for it was an isle on which I had been thrown.
Here I looked round, and must leave my friend the reader to conceive the horror that survey caused within me. On every side I beheld the girdling sea, but not a vestige of a human habitation. I was cast upon an island, about twelve miles in circumference, desert, lonely, and though fertile and densely wooded, uninhabited, save by the monkey and the tortoise! On this isle I soon discovered that I had one companion—a terrible one—despair!