"Do you know where we are?"
"No."
The shore was wild and rocky, and on their right it was covered with a dense growth of tropical trees. Farther inland rose two towering mountains. The beach directly before them was low and receding. A long, level plain, covered with a dense growth of coarse sea-grass, was between them and the hills, which were covered with palms, maguey and other tropical trees.
John feared that they had been wrecked on the coast of some of the Spanish possessions and would be made captives and perhaps slaves by the half-civilized colonists.
They could not live long on the wreck, and he began to look about the deck for some means of going ashore. The pinnace which had been stowed away between decks was an almost complete wreck. It would have been useless had it remained whole, for John and his companion could not have launched it. There was a small boat hanging by the davits, which had sustained no other injury than two holes in its side. He was a fair carpenter, and getting some tools from the carpenter's chest, he mended the boat. After no little trouble, he lowered the boat and, assisting Blanche into it, pulled to the shore half a mile away.
It was a shore on which no human foot had ever trod. The great black stones which lay piled in heaps along the coast to the northeast until they were almost mountain-high forbade the safe approach of a vessel. The entire coast was armed with bristling reefs to guard it against the approach of wandering ships. It was almost miraculous that they had been driven in between the reefs at the only visible opening. A hundred paces in either direction their vessel would have been forced upon the rocks.
"Is this country inhabited?" asked Blanche, when they had landed, and made fast their boat to a great stone.
"I fear not," he answered; "or, if inhabited, it is probably by savages."
"Should that be true, ours will be a sad fate."
"I will not desert you," he answered.