Page:The Naval Officer (1829), vol. 2.djvu/299

 no powder, and therefore stood little chance of killing any of the goats or wild hogs, with which we found the island abounded. One party sought—the means of attaining the highest summit of the island; another went along the shore to the westward; while myself and two others went to the eastward. We crossed several ravines, with much difficulty, until we reached a long valley, which seemed to intersect the island.

Here a wonderful and most melancholy phenomenon arrested our attention. Thousands and thousands of trees covered the valley, each of them about thirty feet high; but every tree was dead, and extended its leafless boughs to another—a forest of desolation, as if nature had at some particular moment ceased to vegetate! There was no underwood or grass. On the lowest of the dead boughs, the gannets, and other sea birds, had built their nests in numbers unaccountable. Their tameness, as Cooper says, "was shocking to me." So unaccustomed