to the
north-eastward, the direction in which at that season and hour the sun
was visible. Proceeding thitherward, the evidences of destruction
became every minute more marked, I might say more universal. Trees had
been thrown down, torn up by the roots, hurled against one another;
rocks broken and flung to great distances, some even thrown up in the
air, and so reversed in falling that, while again half buried in the
soil, they exposed what had been their undermost surface. In a word,
before I had gone two miles I saw that the island had sustained a
shock which might have been that of an earthquake, which certainly
equalled that of the most violent Central American earthquakes in
severity, but which had none of the special peculiarities of that kind
of natural convulsion. Presently I came upon fragments of a shining
pale yellow metal, generally small, but in one or two cases of
remarkable size and shape, apparently torn from some sheet of great
thickness. In one case I found embedded between two such jagged
fragments a piece of remarkably hard impenetrable cement. At last I
came to a point from which through the destruction of the trees the
sea was visible in the direction in which the ship had lain; but the
ship, as in a few moments I satisfied myself, had utterly disappeared.
Reaching the beach, I found that the shock had driven the sea far up
upon the land; fishes lying fifty yards inland, and everything
drenched in salt water. At last, guided by the signs of
ever-increasing devastation, I reached the point whence the mischief
had proceeded. I can give no idea in words of what I there found. The
earth had been torn open, rooted up as if by a gigantic explosion. In
some places sharp-pointed fragments of the coral rock, which at a
depth of several feet formed the bed of the island, were discernible
far below the actual surface. At others, the surface itself was raised
several feet by _debris_ of every kind. What I may call the
crater--though it was no actual hole, but rather a cavity torn and
then filled up by falling fragments--was two or three hundred feet in
circumference; and in this space I found considerable masses of the
same metallic substance, attached generally to pieces of the cement.
After examining and puzzling myself over this strange scene for some
time, my next care was to seek traces of the ship and of her crew; and
before long I saw just outside the coral reef what had been her
bowsprit, and presentl