The governor was fully aware of the danger he ran of having claims, of some sort or other, set up to his islands, if he revealed their existence; and he took the greatest pains to conceal the fact.  The arrival of the Rancocus was mentioned in the papers, as a matter of course; but it was in a way to induce the reader to suppose she had met with her accident in the midst of a naked reef, and principally through the loss of her men; and that, when a few of the last were regained, the voyage was successfully resumed and terminated.  In that day, the great discovery had not been made that men were merely incidents of newspapers; but the world had the folly to believe that newspapers were incidents of society, and were subject to its rules and interests.  Some respect was paid to private rights, and the reign of gossip had not commenced.[4]

[Footnote 4:  We hold in our possession a curious document, the publication of which might rebuke this spirit of gossip, and give a salutary warning to certain managers of the press, who no sooner hear a rumour than they think themselves justified in embalming it among the other truths of their daily sheets.  The occurrences of life brought us in collision, legally, with an editor; and we obtained a verdict against him.  Dissatisfied with defeat, as is apt to be the case, he applied for a new trial.  Such an application was to be sustained by affidavits, and he made his own, as usual.  Now, in this affidavit, our competitor swore distinctly and unequivocally, to certain alleged facts (we think to the number of six), every one of which was untrue.  Fortunately for the party implicated, the matter sworn to was purely ad captandum stuff, and, in a legal sense, not pertinent to the issue.  This prevented it from being perjury in law.  Still, it was all untrue, and nothing was easier than to show it.  Now, we do not doubt that the person thus swearing believed all that he swore to, or he would not have had the extreme folly to expose himself as he did; but he was so much in the habit of publishing gossip in his journal, that, when an occasion arrived, he did not hesitate about swearing to what he had read in other journals, without taking the trouble to inquire if it were true!  One of these days we may lay all this, along with much other similar proof of the virtue there is in gossip, so plainly before the world, that he who runs may read.]

In the last century, however, matters were not carried quite so far as they are at present.  No part of this community, claiming any portion of respectability, was willing to publish its own sense of inferiority so openly, as to gossip about its fellow-citizens, for no more direct admissions of inferiority can be made than this wish to comment on the subject of any one’s private concerns.  Consequently Mark and his islands escaped.  There was no necessity for his telling the insurers anything about the Peak, for instance, and on that part of the subject, therefore, he wisely held his tongue.  Nothing, in short, was said of any colony at all.  The manner in which the crew had been driven away to leeward, and recovered, was told minutely, and the whole process by which the ship was saved.  The property used, Mark said had been appropriated to his wants, without going into details, and the main results being so very satisfactory, the insurers asked no further.