However, "it's dogged as does it," so by dint of sheer sticking
to the oar, we eventually succeeded in getting all our prizes
alongside before eight bells that evening, securing them around
us by hawsers to the cows, but giving the big bull the post of
honour alongside on the best fluke-chain.
We were a busy company for a fortnight thence, until the last of
the oil was run below--two hundred and fifty barrels, or twenty-
five tuns, of the valuable fluid having rewarded our exertions.
During these operations we had drifted night and day, apparently
without anybody taking the slightest account of the direction we
were taking; when, therefore, on the day after clearing up the
last traces of our fishing, the cry of "Land ho!" came ringing
down from the crow's-nest, no one was surprised, although the
part of the Pacific in which we were cruising has but few patches
of TERRA FIRMA scattered about over its immense area when
compared with the crowded archipelagoes lying farther south and
east.
We could not see the reported land from the deck for two hours
after it was first seen from aloft, although the odd spectacle of
a scattered group of cocoa-nut trees apparently growing out of
the sea was for some time presented to us before the island
itself came into view.
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