Just before the evening closed in, our boats landed, and got a few cocoa-nuts, which they brought off, and saw none of the inhabitants.  In the night, during which we had rain and hard squalls, I stood off and on with the ships, and at seven o’clock in the morning brought-to off the inlet.  I immediately sent the boats on shore in search of refreshments, and made all the men who were not so ill of the scurvy as to be laid up, go in them; I also went on shore myself, and continued there the whole day.  We saw many houses or wigwams of the natives, but they were totally deserted, except by the dogs, who kept an incessant howling from the time we came on shore till we returned to the ship:  They were low mean hovels, thatched with cocoa-nut branches; but they were most delightfully situated in a fine grove of stately trees, many of which were the cocoa-nut, and many such as we were utterly unacquainted with.  The cocoa-nut trees seem to furnish them with almost all the necessaries of life; particularly food, sails, cordage; timber, and vessels to hold water; so that probably these people always fix their habitations where the trees abound.  We observed the shore to be covered with coral, and the shells of very large pearl oysters; so that I make no doubt but that as profitable a pearl fishery might be established here as any in the world.  We saw but little of the people, except at a distance; we could however perceive that the women had a piece of cloth of some kind, probably fabricated of the same stuff as their sail, hanging from the waist as low as the knee; the men were naked.

Our people, in rummaging some of the huts, found the carved head of a rudder, which—­had manifestly belonged to a Dutch long-boat, and was very old and worm-eaten.  They found also a piece of hammered iron, a piece of brass, and some small iron tools, which the ancestors of the present inhabitants of this place probably obtained from the Dutch ship to which the long-boat had belonged, all which I brought away with me.  Whether these people found means to cut off the ship, or whether she was lost upon the island, or after she left it, cannot be known; but there is reason to believe that she never returned to Europe, because no account of her voyage, or of any discoveries that she made, is extant.  If the ship sailed from this place in safety, it is not perhaps easy to account for her leaving the rudder of her long-boat behind her:  And if she was cut off by the natives, there must be much more considerable remains of her in the island, especially of her iron-work, upon which all Indian nations, who have no metal, set the highest value; we had no opportunities however to examine this matter farther.  The hammered-iron, brass, and iron tools, I brought away with me; but we found a tool exactly in the form of a carpenter’s adze, the blade of which was a pearl oyster-shell; possibly this might have been made in imitation of an adze which had belonged to the carpenter of the Dutch ship, for among the tools that I brought away there was one which seemed to be the remains of such an implement, though it was worn away almost to nothing.