An hour later the top sails of the corvette had disappeared behind the farthest rocks of False Hope Point.
CHAPTER IV
A RETROSPECT
It will now be proper to give the reader a summary of the first ten years spent in New Switzerland by the survivors of the wreck of the Landlord.
On the 7th of October, in the year 1803, a family was cast upon an unknown land situated in the east of the Indian Ocean.
The head of this family, of Swiss origin, was named Jean Zermatt, his wife was named Betsy. The former was thirty-five years of age, the latter thirty-three. They had four children, all sons, in the following order of birth: Fritz, then fifteen; Ernest, twelve; Jack, ten; and Frank, six.
It was on the seventh day of an appalling storm that the Landlord, on which they had embarked, was driven out of her course in the midst of the ocean. Blown southwards, far beyond Batavia, her port of destination, she struck a mass of rock about four miles from the coast.
M. Zermatt was an intelligent and well-informed man, his wife a brave and devoted woman. Their children presented varieties of character. Fritz was bold and active, Ernest the most serious and studious of the four, though inclined to be selfish, Jack thoughtless and full of fun, Frank still almost a baby. They were a most united family, quite capable of doing well even in the terrible conditions into which evil fortune had just plunged them. Moreover, all of them were animated by deep religious feeling.
M. Zermatt had realised his few effects and left the land of his birth to settle in one of those Dutch over-sea possessions which at that time were at the height of their prosperity, and offered so much promise to active and hardworking men. Now, after a fair voyage across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, the ship which carried him and his family had been cast away. He and his wife and children, alone of all the crew and passengers of the Landlord, had survived the wreck. But it was necessary to abandon without the least delay the ship, entangled among the rocks of the reef. Her hull rent, her masts broken off, her keel snapped in half, and exposed to all the waves of the open sea, the next gale would complete her destruction and scatter her fragments far and wide.