"For many days and nights I wandered through forests of oak, cypress, myrtle, and mimosa trees, enduring constantly the terror of being devoured by wild animals, or falling again among savages who might force me to render a severe account of the blessed fetisher I had kicked into the Gabon, till at last I found myself in a stately wood of sea-pines and _then_ I saw the ocean--the brave old ocean, Jack!--the broad turnpike that could lead us home--the same ocean whose waves swept up by the Nore and Greenwich Reach, to mingle their waters with the Thames--and I laughed with joy, though its bosom was glistening under the vertical sun that scorches the coast of Guinea.
"All the memories of home and Old England swelled up within me as I gazed upon the girdle of her shores. The sea! that
"----glorious mirror where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests; in all time, Calm or convulsed--in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;--boundless, endless, and sublime!"
"When night fell, I came out of the lonely forest to gaze upon the moonlit sea--not that the forest was very _lonely_, after all, as there seemed to be at least fifty thousand baboons, monkeys, and squirrels, which jabbered and leaped as if they had all gone mad, the whole night, from tree to tree, and more than once the roar of a lion came hollowly from a distance, under the lower branches of the pines.
"I sat upon a piece of detached rock, and, to seek for food, dropped my fishing-line into the water. There I soon caught a fish, on which I breakfasted next day, after spreading it, split open, on the rocks, where it was half cooked by the burning sun. As for salt, there was plenty of that to be found among the crevices, where the heat had burned up the spray of the sea.
"For three nights I fished there with success and safety. On the third, I found at my line a fish of strange aspect, and, sailor-like, had some doubts about breakfasting on it, but hunger soon ends all niceties. When morning came, I sought a secluded part of the wood, and thought of lighting a little fire by rubbing dried branches together that I might broil my fish.
"Now, unless I could produce ocular proof of what I am about to say, you would laugh at me for telling you a forecastle yarn, but the proof shall not be wanting.