Brown on Resolution (1929) by C. S. Forester

Author:C. S. Forester [Forester, C. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triad/Mayflower Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE GALAPAGOS ARCHIPELAGO is a group of volcanic islands, bisected by the Equator, seven hundred miles from the American coast. They support no inhabitants—mainly because they have little water—and they are sufficiently distant from the ordinary trade routes (at least until the opening of the Panama Canal) to have remained comparatively unvisited. Their flora and fauna have followed their own lines of evolution without interference from the mainland, so that they boast their own special species of insects and reptiles and cacti. The monstrous Galapagos tortoises gave the Archipelago its collective name, but the individual islands were christened by the Englishmen who called there on sundry occasions; Albemarle, Indefatigable, Chatham, Barrington, Resolution and the rest are all reminiscent of ships or admirals or statesmen. Hither came Woodes, Rogers and Dampier, privateering, and Anson with King George’s commission. The Pacific whalers—Herman Melville among them—called to stock their ships with tortoises. HMS Beagle came here a hundred years ago with a young naturalist of an inquiring turn of mind on board, by name Charles Darwin, who was so struck by the evidence of evolution among the living creatures there that his thoughts were directed to the consideration of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.

Resolution Island is the loneliest and least visited of them all. Once it was a volcanic crater, but it has been extinct for a thousand years or more, and the Pacific has broken in at one point so that in shape it is an incomplete ring of towering cliffs surrounding a central lagoon half a mile across. The entrance gives twenty fathoms of water; the centre of the lagoon is of unplumbed depth. The cliffs themselves (the ring is nowhere more than a quarter of a mile thick) are of lava in huge tumbled jagged blocks with edges like knives, the lower slopes covered thinly with spiky cactus, the upper slopes a naked tangle of rock. The extreme highest ridge, however, where the wind had full play, has been somewhat weathered down, so that the lava edges have been blunted, and are disguised by a layer of smaller pumice.

One glimpse of that central lagoon convinced Captain von Lutz that here indeed was the haven he desired. It was a land-locked harbour which would give shelter in any wind that blew, and already in his mind’s eye he could see Ziethen’s side repaired and the ship herself free to traverse the Pacific and wreak confusion and destruction among the helpless British mercantile marine. Cautiously he made his entrance, for the sailing directions are excessively vague regarding Resolution. He sent a picket boat on ahead, and followed her cautiously, sounding as he went. Ziethen breasted gallantly the race of the tide through the gap (for at the ebb the piled-up water in the lagoon comes surging out through the narrow exit like a mill-race), made her way through with the naked cliffs close on either hand and emerged safely into the lagoon. As she entered the stifling heat of

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