The wreck proved to be a beautiful copper-bottomed schooner, of about a hundred and eighty tons burthen.  She had been dashed on shore with great violence, and thrown many yards above the high-water mark.  Her masts and spars were lying in all directions on the beach, which was strewed with her cargo.  This consisted of a variety of toys and hardware, musical instruments, violins, flutes, fifes, and bird-organs.  Some few remains of books, which I picked up, were French romances, with indelicate plates, and still worse text.  These proved the vessel to be French.  At a short distance from the wreck, on a rising knoll, we found three or four huts, rudely constructed out of the fragments; and, a little farther off, a succession of graves, each surmounted with a cross.  I examined the huts, which contained some rude and simple relics of human tenancy:  a few benches and tables, composed of boards roughly hewn out and nailed together; bones of goats, and of the wild hog, with the remains of burnt wood.  But we could not discover any traces of the name of the vessel or owner; nor were there any names marked or cut on the boards, as might have been expected, to show to whom the vessel belonged, and what had become of the survivors.

This studied concealment of all information led us to the most accurate knowledge of her port of departure, her destination, and her object of trade.  Being on the south-west side of the island, with her head lying to the north-east, she had, beyond all doubt, been running from Rio Janeiro towards the coast of Africa, and got on shore in the night.  That she was going to fetch a cargo of slaves was equally clear, not only from the baubles with which she was freighted but also from the interior fitting of the vessel, and from a number of hand and leg shackles which we found among the wreck, and which we knew were only used for the purposes of confining and securing the unhappy victims of this traffic.

We took up our quarters in the huts for the night, and the next morning divided ourselves into three parties, to explore the island.  I have before observed that we had muskets, but no powder, and therefore stood little chance of killing any of the goats or wild hogs, with which we found the island abounded.  One party sought the means of attaining the highest summit of the island; another went along the shore to the westward; while myself and two others went to the eastward.  We crossed several ravines, with much difficulty, until we reached a long valley, which seemed to intersect the island.

Here a wonderful and most melancholy phenomenon arrested our attention.  Thousands and thousands of trees covered the valley, each of them about thirty feet high; but every tree was dead, and extended its leafless boughs to another—­a forest of desolation, as if nature had at some particular moment ceased to vegetate!  There was no underwood or grass.  On the lowest of the dead boughs, the gannets, and other sea birds, had built their nests in numbers unaccountable.  Their tameness, as Cooper says, “was shocking to me.”  So unaccustomed did they seem to man, that the mothers, brooding over their young, only opened their beaks, in a menacing attitude at us, as we passed by them.