It was my sad lot to see my dear Doto die—­the first of the sufferers in the palace to succumb to the disease.  Meanwhile, the bishop and myself being entirely absorbed in attendance on the sick, the crew of the William Wilberforce, I deeply regret to say, escaped from all restraint, and forgot what was due to themselves and their profession.  They revelled with the most abandoned of the natives, and disease and drink ravaged the once peaceful island.  Every sign of government and order vanished.  The old priest built a huge pile of firewood, and laying himself there with the images of the gods, set fire to the whole, and perished with his own false religion.

After this event, the island ceased to be a safe residence for ourselves.  Among the mountains, as I learned, where the pestilence had not yet penetrated, the shepherds and the wilder tribes were gathering in arms.  One night we stole on board the William Wilberforce, leaving the city desolate, filled with the smoke of funeral pyres, and the wailing of men and women.  There was a dreadful sultry stillness in the air, and all day long wild beasts had been dashing madly into the sea, and the sky had been obscured by flights of birds.  On all the crests of the circle of surrounding hills we saw, in the growing darkness, the beacons and camp fires of the insurgents from the interior.  Just before the dawn the William Wilberforce was attacked by the whole mass of the natives in boats and rafts.  But we had not been unprepared for this movement, nor were the resources of science unequal to the occasion.  We had surrounded the William Wilberforce with a belt, or cordon, of torpedoes, and as each of the assaulting boats touched the boom, a terrible explosion shook the water into fountains of foam, and the waves were strewn with scalded, wounded, and mutilated men.  Meanwhile, we bombarded the city and the harbour, and the night passed amid the most awful sounds and sights—­fire, smoke, yells of anger and pain, cries of the native leaders encouraging their men, and shouts from our own people, who had to repel the boarders, when the boom was at last forced, with pikes and cutlasses.  Just before the dawn a strange thing happened.  A great glowing coal, as it seemed, fell with a hissing crash on the deck of the William Wilberforce, and others dropped, with a strange sound and a dreadful odour of burning, in the water all around us.  Had the natives discovered some mode of retaliating on our use of firearms?

I looked in the direction of their burning city, and beheld, on the sharp peak of the highest mountain (now visible in the grey morning light), an object like a gigantic pine-tree of fire.  The blazing trunk rose, slim and straight, from the mountain crest, and, at a vast height, developed a wilderness of burning branches.  Fearful hollow sounds came from the hill, its sides were seamed with racing cataracts of living lava, of coursing and leaping flames, which