As they left us, Plinny and I moved to the waist of the ship, where we paused by consent, and I resumed my breakfast, munching it as I leaned against the port bulwarks.  We were now rapidly opening Long Bay (as the chart called it), a deep recess running out squarely at either extremity, the bight of it crossed by a beach, and a line of tumbling breakers, that extended for close upon three miles.  Above the beach a forest of tall trees, in height and colour at once distinguishable from the thick bush we had hitherto been passing, screened the bases of a range of hills which obviously formed the backbone of the island; and as the whole bay crept into view we discerned in the north (or, to be accurate, N.N.E.) corner of this long recess a marshy valley dividing the scrub from the forest.  The mouth of this valley, where it widened out upon the beach, measured at least half a mile across.  The chart marked it as Misery Swamp, and indicated a river there.  We could detect none, or, at any rate, no river entrance.  If river there were, doubtless it emptied its waters through the fringe of grey-green weeds, and dispersed over the flat-looking foreshore; but even at two miles’ distance it looked to be a dismal, fever-haunted spot.

By contrast, the noble range of woodland to southward of it and the rocky peaks that rose in delicate shadow above the tree-tops were beautiful as a dream, even to eyes fresh from the forest scenery of Jamaica; and while Plinny leant with me against the bulwarks, I felt that in the silence immortal verse was shaping itself, which it did after a while to this effect—­

     “Arrived o’er the limitless ocean
        In 16 degrees of N. latitude,
      Our lips were attuned to devotion,
        Our spirits uplifted in gratitude.

     “Our hearts with poetic afflatus
        Took wing and impulsively soared
      As the lead-line (a quaint apparatus)
        Reported the depth overboard.

     “Oh, oft had I dream’d of the tropics—­
        But never to see them in person—­
      So full of remarkable topics
        To speculate, sing, and converse on.”

It was Mr. Goodfellow who worked the hand-lead, under Captain Branscome’s orders, from a perch just forward of the main rigging; but at a mile’s distance we carried deep water with us past Crabtree Point, and around the unnamed small cape which formed the south-western extremity of the island.  We rounded this, and, hauling up to the wind, found (as the reader may discover for himself by a glance at the chart) that the shore made almost directly E. by N., with scarcely an indentation, for Gow’s Gulf.

Here the water shoaled, though for the first mile almost imperceptibly.  The inlet itself resembled the estuary of a mighty river, its both sides well wooded, though very different in configuration, the northern rising quietly from shelving beaches of coral-white sand to some of the most respectable hills in the island, while that on our starboard hand presented a succession of cliff and chasm, the cliffs varying, as we judged, from two hundred to two hundred and fifty feet sheer.