216 Pickering on the Language and Inhabitants 
showing its summit a few feet above the surface of the boundless 
waters that environ it; solitary, in sight of no other land, and en- 
circled with its coral reef, from an eighth to half a mile in breadth, 
and on its outside washed by the bottomless ocean, of darkest 
blue, in which the sounding-lead of the mariner 
“Drops plumb down 
Ten thousand fathom deep.’’* 
The whole island rises so little above the level of the sea, that 
the swell often rolls up to a considerable distance inland. 
It was long supposed to be uninhabited; and the two seamen 
above alluded to were told by the natives, that no white man had 
ever before been on the island. Horsburgh, however, correctly de- 
scribes it as being inhabited, and states, that the inhabitants some- 
times come off in their canoes to ships that pass near the island.t 
The two seamen before mentioned state, that there were three vil- 
lages upon it, situated on the shores, and containing, in all, between 
three and four hundred souls at the time when they were first 
taken there; but that the number was considerably diminished by 
famine and disease before they left the place. 
As the residence of these two American seamen on the island 
has been the means of our obtaining more minute information than 
we before possessed, or shall be likely to obtain of this people 
and their language for a long time to come, it will not be uninter- 
esting to give a very concise narrative of the circumstances by which 
those men were thrown upon this inhospitable spot of earth. The 
leading facts of their shipwreck and captivity are stated at large 
in an unpretending “Narrative,” published by one of them, Hor- 
ace Holden; and that they are faithfully stated I can have no 
* Milton’s Paradise Lost. + East India Directory, p. 571. 
