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- rushing keels. Their thirty kelsons hummed like thirty harp-strings,
and looked as straight whilst they left their parallel traces on the
sea. But there proved too many hunters for the game. The fleet broke
up, and went their separate ways out of sight, leaving my own ship and
two trim gentlemen of London. These last, finding no luck either,
likewise vanished; and Lee Bay, with all its appurtenances, and without
a rival, devolved to us.
The way of cruising here is this. You keep hovering about the entrance
of the bay, in one beat and out the next. But at times—not always, as
in other parts of the group—a racehorse of a current sweeps right
across its mouth. So, with all sails set, you carefully ply your tacks.
How often, standing at the foremast head at sunrise, with our patient
prow pointed in between these isles, did I gaze upon that land, not of
cakes, but of clinkers, not of streams of sparkling water, but arrested
torrents of tormented lava.
As the ship runs in from the open sea, Narborough presents its side in
one dark craggy mass, soaring up some five or six thousand feet, at
which point it hoods itself in heavy clouds, whose lowest level fold is
as clearly defined against the rocks as the snow-line against the
Andes. There is dire mischief going on in that upper dark. There toil
the demons of fire, who, at intervals, irradiate the nights with a
strange spectral illumination for miles and miles around, but
unaccompanied by any further demonstration; or else, suddenly announce
themselves by terrific concussions, and the full drama of a volcanic
eruption. The blacker that cloud by day, the more may you look for
light by night. Often whalemen have found themselves cruising nigh that
burning mountain when all aglow with a ball-room blaze. Or, rather,
glass-works, you may call this same vitreous isle of Narborough, with
its tall chimney-stacks.
Where we still stand, here on Rodondo, we cannot see all the other
isles, but it is a good place from which to point out where they lie.
Yonder, though, to the E.N.E., I mark a distant dusky ridge. It is
Abington Isle, one of the most northerly of the group; so solitary,
remote, and blank, it looks like No-Man’s Land seen off our northern
shore. I doubt whether two human beings ever touched upon that spot. So
far as yon Abington Isle is concerned, Adam and his billions of
posterity remain uncreated.
Ranging south of Abington, and quite out of sight behind the long spine
of Albemarle, lies James’s Isle, so called by the early Buccaneers
after the luckless Stuart, Duke of York. Observe here, by the way,
that, excepting the isles particularized in comparatively recent times,
and which mostly received the names of famous Admirals, the Encantadas
were first christened by the Spaniards; but these Spanish names were
generally effaced on English charts by the subsequent christenings of
the Buccaneers, who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, called
them after English noblemen and kings. Of these loyal freebooters and
the things which associate their name with the Encantadas, we shall
hear anon. Nay, for one little item, immediately; for between James’s
Isle and Albemarle, lies a fantastic islet, strangely known as
“Cowley’s Enchanted Isle.” But, as all the group is deemed enchanted,
the reason must be given for the spell within a spell involved by this
particular designation. The name was bestowed by that excellent
Buccaneer himself, on his first visit here. Speaking in his published
voyages of this spot, he says—“My fancy led me to call it Cowley’s
Enchanted Isle, for, we having had a sight of it upon several points of
the compass, it appeared always in so many different forms; sometimes
like a ruined fortification; upon another point like a great city,”
etc. No wonder though, that among the Encantadas all sorts of ocular
deceptions and mirages should be met.
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