It was about three P.M. when they pushed off, and (the wind being still westerly) fell to the oars.  “Well, we’ve got the guts out of YOU!” was the captain’s nodded farewell to the hulk of the Currency Lass, which presently shrank and faded in the sea.  A little after a calm succeeded, with much rain; and the first meal was eaten, and the watch below lay down to their uneasy slumber on the bilge under a roaring shower-bath.  The twenty-ninth dawned overhead from out of ragged clouds; there is no moment when a boat at sea appears so trenchantly black and so conspicuously little; and the crew looked about them at the sky and water with a thrill of loneliness and fear.  With sunrise the trade set in, lusty and true to the point; sail was made; the boat flew; and by about four in the afternoon, they were well up with the closed part of the reef, and the captain standing on the thwart, and holding by the mast, was studying the island through the binoculars.

“Well, and where’s your station?” cried Mac.

“I don’t someway pick it up,” replied the captain.

“No, nor never will!” retorted Mac, with a clang of despair and triumph in his tones.

The truth was soon plain to all.  No buoys, no beacons, no lights, no coal, no station; the castaways pulled through a lagoon and landed on an isle, where was no mark of man but wreckwood, and no sound but of the sea.  For the seafowl that harboured and lived there at the epoch of my visit were then scattered into the uttermost parts of the ocean, and had left no traces of their sojourn besides dropped feathers and addled eggs.  It was to this they had been sent, for this they had stooped all night over the dripping oars, hourly moving further from relief.  The boat, for as small as it was, was yet eloquent of the hands of men, a thing alone indeed upon the sea but yet in itself all human; and the isle, for which they had exchanged it, was ingloriously savage, a place of distress, solitude, and hunger unrelieved.  There was a strong glare and shadow of the evening over all; in which they sat or lay, not speaking, careless even to eat, men swindled out of life and riches by a lying book.  In the great good nature of the whole party, no word of reproach had been addressed to Hadden, the author of these disasters.  But the new blow was less magnanimously borne, and many angry glances rested on the captain.

Yet it was himself who roused them from their lethargy.  Grudgingly they obeyed, drew the boat beyond tidemark, and followed him to the top of the miserable islet, whence a view was commanded of the whole wheel of the horizon, then part darkened under the coming night, part dyed with the hues of the sunset and populous with the sunset clouds.  Here the camp was pitched and a tent run up with the oars, sails, and mast.  And here Amalu, at no man’s bidding, from the mere instinct of habitual service, built a fire and cooked a meal.  Night was come, and the stars and the silver sickle of new moon beamed overhead, before the meal was ready.  The cold sea shone about them, and the fire glowed in their faces, as they ate.  Tommy had opened his case, and the brown sherry went the round; but it was long before they came to conversation.