Section 233. A CURIOUS STORY[1]. I.
Reading edition
Section 233. A CURIOUS STORY[1]. I.
We heard a curious story at Tristan[2] about two Germans who had settled nearly two years before on Inaccessible Island[3]. Once a year, about the month of December, the Tristan men go[4] to the two outlying islands to pick up the few seals which are still to be found there. On two of these occasions they had seen the Germans, and within a few months smoke had risen from the island, which they attributed[5] to their having fired (S. 161, N. 21) some of the brushwood; but as they had seen or heard nothing of them since, they thought the probability was that they had perished. Captain Nares[6] wished to visit the other islands, and to ascertain the fate of the two men was an additional object in doing so[7].
Next morning we were close under Inaccessible Island, the second in size of the little group of three. The ship was surrounded by multitudes of penguins[8], and as few of us had any previous personal acquaintance with this eccentric form of life[9], we followed their movements with great interest. The penguin as a rule swims under water, rising now and then and resting on the surface, like one of the ordinary water-birds, but more frequently with its body entirely covered, and only lifting its head from time to time to breathe.
The structure of Inaccessible Island is very much the same as Tristan, only the pre-eminent feature[10] of the latter, the snowy cone, is wanting. A wall of volcanic rocks, about the same height as the cliff at Tristan, and which one is inclined to believe to have been at one time continuous with it, entirely surrounds Inaccessible Island, falling for the most part sheer[11] into the sea, and it seems that it slopes sufficiently to allow a tolerably easy ascent to the plateau on the top at one point only.