wer Brooks Island, the Directory named
them: two low, bush-covered, rolling strips of sand, each with
glittering beaches, each perhaps a mile or a mile and a half in length,
running east and west, and divided by a narrow channel. Over these,
innumerable as maggots, there hovered, chattered, and screamed millions
of twinkling sea-birds; white and black; the black by far the largest.
With singular scintillations, this vortex of winged life swayed to and
fro in the strong sunshine, whirled continually through itself, and
would now and again burst asunder and scatter as wide as the lagoon: so
that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular
convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the
adjacent sea--the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions.
And, a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and
centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her
sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag
that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main--the
_Flying Scud_, the fruit of so many toilers, a recollection of so many
lives of men, whose tall spars had been mirrored in the remotest corners
of the sea--lay stationary at last and for ever, in the first stage of
naval dissolution. Towards her the taut _Norah Creina_, vulture-wise,
wriggled to windward: come from so far to pick her bones. And, look as I
pleased, there was no other presence of man or of man's handiwork; no
Honolulu schooner lay there crowded with armed rivals, no smoke rose
from the fire at which I fancied Trent cooking a meal of sea-birds. It
seemed, after all, we were in time, and I drew a mighty breath.

I had not arrived at this reviving certainty before the breakers were
already close aboard, the leadsman at his station, and the captain
posted in the fore cross-trees to con us through the coral lumps of the
lagoon. All circumstances were in our favour, the light behind, the sun
low, the wind still fresh and steady, and the tide about the turn. A
moment later we shot at racing speed betwixt two pier heads of broken
water; the lead began to be cast, the captain to bawl down his anxious
directions, the schooner to tack and dodge among the scattered dangers
of the lagoon; and at one bell in the first dog-watch we had come to our
anchor off the north-east end of Middle Brooks Island, in five fathoms
water. The sails were gasketed and covered