upon our sails in puffs, which
strengthened and grew more continuous; presently the _Casco_ heeled down
to her day's work; the whale-boat, quite outstripped, clung for a noisy
moment to her quarter; the stipulated bread, rum, and tobacco were
passed in; a moment more and the boat was in our wake, and our late
pilots were cheering our departure.

This was the more inspiriting as we were bound for scenes so different,
and though on a brief voyage, yet for a new province of creation. That
wide field of ocean, called loosely the South Seas, extends from tropic
to tropic, and from perhaps 120 degrees W. to 150 degrees E., a
parallelogram of one hundred degrees by forty-seven, where degrees are
the most spacious. Much of it lies vacant, much is closely sown with
isles, and the isles are of two sorts. No distinction is so continually
dwelt upon in South Sea talk as that between the "low" and the "high"
island, and there is none more broadly marked in nature. The Himalayas
are not more different from the Sahara. On the one hand, and chiefly in
groups of from eight to a dozen, volcanic islands rise above the sea;
few reach an altitude of less than 4,000 feet; one exceeds 13,000; their
tops are often obscured in cloud, they are all clothed with various
forests, all abound in food, and are all remarkable for picturesque and
solemn scenery. On the other hand, we have the atoll; a thing of
problematic origin and history, the reputed creature of an insect
apparently unidentified; rudely annular in shape; enclosing a lagoon;
rarely extending beyond a quarter of a mile at its chief width; often
rising at its highest point to less than the stature of a man--man
himself, the rat and the land crab, its chief inhabitants; not more
variously supplied with plants; and offering to the eye, even when
perfect, only a ring of glittering beach and verdant foliage, enclosing
and enclosed by the blue sea.

In no quarter are the atolls so thickly congregated, in none are they so
varied in size from the greatest to the least, and in none is navigation
so beset with perils, as in that archipelago that we were now to thread.
The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by
this multiplicity of reefs; the wind intermits, squalls are frequent
from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are,
besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the
charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number