r isles, where there is plenty of sea-room; and hence, to that
vicinity, the above remarks do not altogether apply; though even there
the current runs at times with singular force, shifting, too, with as
singular a caprice.

Indeed, there are seasons when currents quite unaccountable prevail for
a great distance round about the total group, and are so strong and
irregular as to change a vessel's course against the helm, though
sailing at the rate of four or five miles the hour. The difference in
the reckonings of navigators, produced by these causes, along with the
light and variable winds, long nourished a persuasion, that there
existed two distinct clusters of isles in the parallel of the
Encantadas, about a hundred leagues apart. Such was the idea of their
earlier visitors, the Buccaneers; and as late as 1750, the charts of
that part of the Pacific accorded with the strange delusion. And this
apparent fleetingness and unreality of the locality of the isles was
most probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada,
or Enchanted Group.

But not uninfluenced by their character, as they now confessedly exist,
the modern voyager will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal of this
name might have in part originated in that air of spell-bound desertness
which so significantly invests the isles. Nothing can better suggest the
aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into
ashes. Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, they
themselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same:
fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death.

Nor would the appellation, enchanted, seem misapplied in still another
sense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these
wilds--whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name,
Gallipagos--concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long
cherished a superstition, not more frightful than grotesque. They
earnestly believe that all wicked sea-officers, more especially
commodores and captains, are at death (and, in some cases, before death)
transformed into tortoises; thenceforth dwelling upon these hot
aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.

Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought was originally inspired by the
woe-begone landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps, by the
tortoises. For, apart from their strictly physi