Across the Zodiac | Page 5

drove us completely out of our course, nor was I much astonished that the
captain was for some days, partly from fright and partly from drink, incapable of using
his sextant to ascertain the position of the ship. One night we were awakened by a
tremendous shock; and, to spare you the details of a shipwreck, which have nothing to do
with my story, we found ourselves when day broke fast on a coral reef, about a mile from
an island of no great size, and out of sight of all other land. The sextant having been
broken to pieces, I had no means of ascertaining the position of this island, nor do I now
know anything of it except that it lay, in the month of August, within the region of the
southeast trade winds. We pulled on shore, but, after exploring the island, it was found to
yield nothing attractive to seamen except cocoa-nuts, with which our crew had soon
supplied themselves as largely as they wished, and fish, which were abundant and easily
caught, and of which they were soon tired. The captain, therefore, when he had recovered
his sobriety and his courage, had no great difficulty in inducing them to return to the ship,
and endeavour either to get her off or construct from her timbers a raft which, following
the course of the winds, might, it was thought, bring them into the track of vessels. This
would take some time, and I meanwhile was allowed to remain (my own wish) on terra
firma; the noise, dirt, and foul smells of the vessel being, especially in that climate,
intolerable.
"About ten o'clock in the morning of the 25th August 1867, I was lying towards the
southern end of the island, on a little hillock tolerably clear of trees, and facing a sort of
glade or avenue, covered only with brush and young trees, which allowed me to see the
sky within perhaps twenty degrees of the horizon. Suddenly, looking up, I saw what
appeared at first like a brilliant star considerably higher than the sun. It increased in size
with amazing rapidity, till, in a very few seconds after its first appearance, it had a very
perceptible disc. For an instant it obscured the sun. In another moment a tremendous
shock temporarily deprived me of my senses, and I think that more than an hour had
elapsed before I recovered them. Sitting up, somewhat confused, and looking around me,

I became aware that some strange accident had occurred. In every direction I saw such
traces of havoc as I had witnessed more than once when a Confederate force holding an
impenetrable woodland had been shelled at random for some hours with the largest guns
that the enemy could bring into the field. Trees were torn and broken, branches scattered
in all directions, fragments of stone, earth, and coral rock flung all around. Particularly I
remember that a piece of metal of considerable size had cut off the tops of two or three
trees, and fixed itself at last on what was now the summit of one about a third of whose
length had been broken off and lay on the ground. I soon perceived that this miraculous
bombardment had proceeded from a point to the north-eastward, the direction in which at
that season and hour the sun was visible. Proceeding thitherward, the evidences of
destruction became every minute more marked, I might say more universal. Trees had
been thrown down, torn up by the roots, hurled against one another; rocks broken and
flung to great distances, some even thrown up in the air, and so reversed in falling that,
while again half buried in the soil, they exposed what had been their undermost surface.
In a word, before I had gone two miles I saw that the island had sustained a shock which
might have been that of an earthquake, which certainly equalled that of the most violent
Central American earthquakes in severity, but which had none of the special peculiarities
of that kind of natural convulsion. Presently I came upon fragments of a shining pale
yellow metal, generally small, but in one or two cases of remarkable size and shape,
apparently torn from some sheet of great thickness. In one case I found embedded
between two such jagged fragments a piece of remarkably hard impenetrable cement. At
last I came to a point from which through the destruction of the trees the sea was visible
in the direction in which the ship had lain; but the ship, as in a few moments I satisfied
myself, had utterly disappeared. Reaching the beach, I found that the shock had driven
the sea far up upon the land; fishes lying fifty yards inland, and everything drenched in
salt water.