y sun, pouring down a
withering flood of light and heat; not a sea-bird is to be discovered
wheeling on its flight, or balancing on its wings as it pierces the deep
with its searching eye, ready to dart upon its prey. All is silence,
solitude, and desolation, save that occasionally may be seen the fin of
some huge shark, either sluggishly moving through the heated element, or
stationary in the torpor of the mid-day heat. A sight so sterile, so
stagnant, so little adapted to human life, cannot well be conceived,
unless, by flying to extremes, we were to portray the chilling blast,
the transfixing cold, and 'close-ribbed ice' at the frozen poles.

At the entrance of this bay, in about three fathoms water, heedless of
the spring cable which hung down as a rope which had fallen overboard,
there floated, motionless as death, a vessel whose proportions would
have challenged the unanimous admiration of those who could appreciate
the merits of her build, had she been anchored in the most frequented
and busy harbour of the universe. So beautiful were her lines, that you
might almost have imagined her a created being that the ocean had been
ordered to receive, as if fashioned by the Divine Architect, to add to
the beauty and variety of His works; for, from the huge leviathan to the
smallest of the finny tribe--from the towering albatross to the boding
petrel of the storm--where could be found, among the winged or finned
frequenters of the ocean, a form more appropriate, more fitting, than
this specimen of human skill, whose beautiful model and elegant tapering
spars were now all that could be discovered to break the meeting lines
of the firmament and horizon of the offing.

Alas! she was fashioned, at the will of avarice, for the aid of cruelty
and injustice, and now was even more nefariously employed. She had been
a slaver--she was now the far-famed, still more dreaded, pirate
schooner, the _Avenger_.

Not a man-of-war which scoured the deep but had her instructions
relative to this vessel, which had been so successful in her career of
crime--not a trader in any portion of the navigable globe but whose crew
shuddered at the mention of her name, and the remembrance of the
atrocities which had been practised by her reckless crew. She had been
everywhere--in the east, the west, the north, and the south, leaving a
track behind her of rapine and of murder. There she lay in motionless
beauty, her low sides were painted black, with o