Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/451

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THE LABRADOR JOURNAL
397

ledges which projected everywhere, and sent the angry waters foaming into the air. The wind now freshened, the "Ripley's" sails swelled, and she was gently propelled through the water and came within sight of the harbor, on the rocks of which we stood waiting for her, when all of a sudden she veered, and we saw her topsails hauled in and bent in a moment; we thought she must have seen a sunken rock, and had thus wheeled to avoid it, but soon saw her coming up again and learned that it was merely because she had nearly passed the entrance of the harbor ere aware of it. Our harbor is the very representation of the bottom of a large bowl, in the centre of which our vessel is now safely at anchor, surrounded by rocks fully a thousand feet high, and the wildest-looking place I ever was in. After supper we all went ashore; some scampered up the steepest hills next to us, but John, Shattuck, and myself went up the harbor, and after climbing to the top of a mountain (for I cannot call it a hill) went down a steep incline, up another hill, and so on till we reached the crest of the island, and surveyed all beneath us. Nothing but rocks—barren rocks—wild as the wildest of the Apennines everywhere; the moss only a few inches deep, and the soil or decomposed matter beneath it so moist that, wherever there was an incline, the whole slipped from under our feet like an avalanche, and down we slid for feet or yards. The labor was excessive; at the bottom of each dividing ravine the scrub bushes intercepted our way for twenty or thirty paces, over which we had to scramble with great exertion, and on our return we slid down fifty feet or more into an unknown pit of moss and mire, more or less deep. We started a female Black-cap Warbler from her nest, and I found it with four eggs, placed in the fork of a bush about three feet from the ground; a beautiful little mansion, and I will describe it to-morrow. I am wet through, and find the mosquitoes as troublesome as in the Floridas.