of Lord North’s Island. 215 
Tobi, or Tébee, and it appears to have taken its most common 
English name from the English ship Lord orth, by which it was 
seen on the 14th of July, 1782; before that time, as Mr. Hors- 
burgh says, “it seems not to have been known.” * 
But, although this may have been the first knowledge which 
English navigators had of it, yet, as the island lies in an archipel- 
ago which was within the field of the earliest Spanish and Por- 
tuguese voyages, and as the natives had pieces of iron in their pos- 
session, and had also in common use in their vocabulary two words 
that must have been taken from the Spanish and Portuguese lan- 
guages, we may infer that it had been previously known to the 
enterprising navigators of those nations.t Subsequently to the 
voyage of the ship Lord Worth, it was seen, but not visited, by 
other English vessels (the Raymond, Asia, and Montrose), on the 
Ist of January, 1789, again in April, 1794, by Captain Seton, of 
the Helen, and since that time by several other ships. 
The island is small and low; in Horsburgh’s work, above cited, 
it is said to be about one mile or one mile and a half in extent, 
east-southeast and west-northwest; but according to the estimate 
of two American seamen, who lived upon it for two years (and 
who will be mentioned hereafter), it is only about three quarters 
of a mile long, and about half a mile in width; or about as large 
as the island in this immediate vicinity now called East Boston. 
This little spot of earth, if the comparison may be allowed, stands 
like a lofty tower rising from the depths of the ocean, and just 
* India Directory, p. 571, 5th edit., 1841. 
{ These two words are (as pronounced by the seamen) shambardro and 
shappo, by which the natives called a hat, and which are manifestly corrupted 
from the Spanish sombréro, and the Portuguese chapéo, or, possibly, from the 
French chapeau. 
