pointment, and the prospect of their longer continuance
at sea. Our water, too, began to grow scarce, and a general dejection
prevailed among us, which added much to the virulence of the disease,
and destroyed numbers of our best men. To all these calamities, there
was added this vexatious circumstance, after getting sight of the main
land, that we were so much delayed by calms and contrary winds, while
tacking westwards in quest of the island, that it took us nine days
to regain the westing, which we ran down in two when standing to the
eastward.

In this desponding condition, and under these disheartening
circumstances, we stood to the westward, with a crazy ship, a great
scarcity of fresh water, and a crew so universally diseased, that
there were not above ten foremast men in a watch capable of doing
duty, and even some of these lame and unable to go aloft. At last, at
day-break on the 9th of June, we discovered the long-wished-for island
of Juan Fernandez. Owing to our suspecting ourselves to be to the
westward of this island on the 28th of May, and in consequence of the
delay occasioned by our standing in for the main and returning, we
lost between seventy and eighty of our men, whom we had doubtless
saved, if we had made the island on that day, which we could not
have failed to do, if we had kept on our course only for a few hours
longer.

SECTION XI.

_Arrival of the Centurion at Juan Fernandez, with a Description of
that Island._

As mentioned in the preceding section, we descried the island of
Juan Fernandez at day-break on the 9th June, bearing N. by E. 1/2
E. distant eleven or twelve leagues. Though on this first view it
appeared very mountainous, ragged, and irregular, yet it was land,
and the land we sought for, and was therefore a most agreeable sight:
because here only we could hope to put a period to those terrible
calamities with which we had so long struggled, which had already
swept away above half of our crew, and which, had we continued only
a few days longer at sea, must inevitably have completed our
destruction. For we were now reduced to so helpless a condition, that,
out of two hundred and odd men who remained alive, taking all our
watches together, we could not muster hands now to work the ship on
any emergency, even including the officers, the servants, and the
boys.

The wind being northerly when we first made the island, we kept plying
to windward all that day, and the ensuing ni