John Hawkins was extreme sick’ (he died within ten days), ’which his sickness began upon newes of the taking of the Francis’ (his stern-most vessel).  ’The 18th day wee weied and stood north and by east into a lesser sound, which Sir Francis in his barge discovered the night before; and ankored in 13 fadomes, having hie steepe hiles on either side, some league distant from our first riding.

’The 12 in the morning we weied and set sayle into the Sea due south through a small streit but without danger’—­possibly the very gap in which the Rhone’s wreck now lies—­’and then stode west and by north for S. Juan de Puerto Rico.’

This northerly course is, plainly, the most advantageous for a homeward-bound ship, as it strikes the Gulf Stream soonest, and keeps in it longest.  Conversely, the southerly route by the Azores is best for outward-bound ships; as it escapes most of the Gulf Stream, and traverses the still Sargasso Sea, and even the extremity of the westward equatorial current.

Strange as these Virgin Isles had looked when seen from the south, outside, and at the distance of a few miles, they looked still more strange when we were fairly threading our way between them, sometimes not a rifle-shot from the cliffs, with the white coral banks gleaming under our keel.  Had they ever carried a tropic vegetation?  Had the hills of Tortola and Virgin Gorda, in shape and size much like those which surround a sea-loch in the Western Islands, ever been furred with forests like those of Guadaloupe or St. Lucia?  The loftier were now mere mounds of almost barren earth; the lower were often, like ‘Fallen Jerusalem,’ mere long earthless moles, as of minute Cyclopean masonry.  But what had destroyed their vegetation, if it ever existed?  Were they not, too, the mere remnants of a submerged and destroyed land, connected now only by the coral shoals?  So it seemed to us, as we ran out past the magnificent harbour at the back of Virgin Gorda, where, in the old war times, the merchantmen of all the West Indies used to collect, to be conveyed homeward by the naval squadron, and across a shallow sea white with coral beds.  We passed to leeward of the island, or rather reef, of Anegada, so low that it could only be discerned, at a few miles’ distance, by the breaking surf and a few bushes; and then plunged, as it were, suddenly out of shallow white water into deep azure ocean.  An upheaval of only forty fathoms would, I believe, join all these islands to each other, and to the great mountain island of Porto Rico to the west.  The same upheaval would connect with each other Anguilla, St. Martin, and St. Bartholomew, to the east.  But Santa Cruz, though so near St. Thomas’s, and the Virgin Gordas to the south, would still be parted from them by a gulf nearly two thousand fathoms deep—­a gulf which marks still, probably, the separation of two ancient continents, or at least two archipelagoes.