From inlet nearest shore go 200 paces to summit where Grove is. From most eastern palm measure 12 steps to Ye Umbrela Tree and seven beyond. Take a Be line from here thirty paces throu ye Forked Tree. Here cut a Rite Anggel N. N. E. till Tong of Spit is lost. Cast three long steps Souwest to Big Rock and dig on landward side.
(Sined)
Bully Evans X (His Mark) Nat Quinn
While I had been poring over this map and the directions with it in my office at San Francisco it had seemed an easy thing to follow them, but in this dense, tropical jungle I found it quite another matter.
The vegetation and the underbrush were so rank that one found himself buried before he had gone three steps in them.
No doubt at the time when the survivors of the Mary Ann of Bristol had cached their ill-gotten doubloons a recent fire had swept this point of land so that they had found no difficulty in traversing it, but now the jungle was so thick and matted that I decided to begin by cutting roads to the palm grove and the umbrella tree.
From the yacht I got hatchets and machetes and we set to work. Before night we all had a tremendous respect for the power of resistance offered by a Panama jungle. We might almost as well have hacked at rubber.
There was none of that sturdy solidity of our northern woods. The jungle yields to every blow and springs back into place with a persistence that seems devilish. By nightfall we had made so little progress that I was discouraged.
To our right there was a mangrove swamp. As we passed its edge on the way back to the boat our eyes beheld thousands upon thousands of birds coming there to roost for the night. Among them were many aigrette herons, white as the driven snow. I think I have never seen a bird so striking as this one.
Blythe, with Neidlinger, Higgins, our engineers, and the other fireman, took the second day on shore. Morgan was doing the cooking, and so was exempt from service. Dugan, still weak from his wound, was helping in the galley as best as he could.