* * * * *
After that I must have gone to sleep, and I woke up in broad daylight to find myself very hungry and very cold. Jones was lying coiled up in the grass and sound asleep, the Commander was peering through the bushes with his field-glasses and making little sketches in his note-book in front of him. He heard me stir, smiled cheerfully as he broke off a stalk of grass and began chewing it, and handed me his glasses.
"Start away from your right and tell me what you see."
Sliding into a better position, I had a splendid view of the whole harbour. On the extreme right I could see the low ground from which the black-bearded man had shaken his fist at us yesterday, and the narrow channel of water marking the outlet. Sweeping the glasses towards the left, I made out some torpedo-boats moored close together in a little bay.
"How many can you count?" the Commander asked me.
I counted seven. Then came three old-fashioned craft, ship-rigged with their to'-gallants and top-masts struck, whilst anchored all round them was a crowd of junks without a sign of life among them. They all seemed deserted.
"Those are the corvettes missing from the Yangtze Squadron," the Commander explained, excitedly for him, and his enthusiasm made one feel quite cheerful and frightfully excited too.
Still farther along to the left were twelve merchant steamers of all sizes and in no regular order—some mere hulks with no masts or boats, one without a funnel. Others, some four or five, had swarms of people on board, and from the clattering and hammering that came from them they seemed to be under repair. I told the Commander what I thought.
"Yes," he said, "they are altering them so that they can sell them without their old owners being able to recognize them."
Inshore I could see quite a busy little town, with large sheds and wooden warehouses, and hundreds of primitive bamboo-matting huts,—the pirate town, I knew, and you can guess that I forgot all about being hungry.