Such is the scene to which we invite our reader’s attention for a little while.

 

At the time of which we write it was an eminently⁴ peaceful scene. So still was the atmosphere, so unruffled the water, that the island and the piratical-looking schooner seemed to float in the centre of a duplex world, where every cloudlet in the blue above had its exact counterpart in the blue below. No sounds were heard save the dull roar of the breaker that fell, at long regular intervals⁶, on the seaward side of the reef, and no motion was visible except the back-fin of a shark as it cut a line occasionally on the sea, or the stately sweep of an albatross, as it passed above the schooner’s masts and cast a look of solemn inquiry⁷ upon her deck.

 

But that schooner was not a pirate. She was an honest trader—at least so it was said—though what she traded in we have no more notion than the albatross which gazed at her with such inquisitive⁸ sagacity. Her decks were not particularly clean, her sails by no means snow-white. She had, indeed, four goodly-sized carronades, but these were not an extraordinary part of a peaceful trader’s armament in those regions, where man was, and still is, unusually savage⁹. The familiar union Jack¹⁰ hung at her peak, and some of her men were sedate-looking Englishmen, though others were Lascars and Malays, of the cut-throat type, of whom any wickedness might be expected when occasion served.

分享到：