79 

 and their speed, and could have used my watch, the sun, and the 

 stars to find the way to the Comores. Those islands are all high and 

 can be seen a long way off, but my wife showed an unusual lack 

 of enthusiasm whenever I raised the project. Nevertheless, I was 

 sorely tempted just to go and look, but there were too many 

 obstacles. It had been difficult to reach this virgin part at all, and 

 it was proving so rich it would have been almost a crime to have 

 gone somewhere else on a mere chance when every moment 

 where we were was yielding rich results. We had very little water 

 and, in any case, I could not take their vessel to foreign territory 

 without the prior consent of the Portuguese authorities, who were 

 nearly as far off from us as the moon. In that wind-lashed sea, 

 among those remote islands, we were quite cut off from civilisa- 

 tion. Its isolation was emphasised by the way in which the only 

 occasional native fishermen we saw, whether ashore or afloat, fled 

 at our approach. This amused our crew, who always laughed with 

 delight at their flight, and they explained that those men were 

 almost certainly fugitive canoe-tax defaulters. 



