We have now left behind us that most solitary and vast portion of the South Pacific almost entirely devoid of the smallest fragments of land, and we are entering that part thickly spattered with rocks and islets that most people never heard of, not to mention the thousands of islands to the westward that form the great clusters of the Society, Friendly, Samoan, Gilbert, Ellice, Marquesas, Caroline, New Hebrides, Ladrone, and Marshall groups. For instance, in our neighborhood at present are the islets of San Felix, San Ambrosio, Podesta, Sala-y-Gomez, and the Emily and Minnehaha rocks; doubtless there are dozens of others besides, too insignificant to appear on a chart of the world, such as I work with. These few, however, will serve to show how thickly sown the Pacific is with insular obstructions; and it is for this reason that this ocean, bar that part south of 30° south, has never seemed to me as desolate or lonely as the Atlantic, north or south. Behold how fittingly Nature has cleared the North Atlantic of nearly every indication of land and has left an abundance of clear, open water, through which rush the great steamers which connect Europe and America, safe in the knowledge that even if they drifted about for months with disabled machinery there would be practically nothing to interrupt their wanderings. The most remarkable proof of this was the case of the large schooner “Fannie E. Woolston,” timber-laden, which drifted about for thirty months, covering six thousand miles in that time, an average of over three knots per hour, without approaching land. This was ascertained by means of the reports of many different vessels which passed close to the “Woolston” during her perigrinations. Indeed, the only island that lies at all near the track of steamers bound from the more northerly European ports to those north of Baltimore is the terrible Sable Island, the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” in 44° north, 60° west, about two hundred miles east of Halifax. More vessels are lost here than at any other spot in open water, and its number of casualties are probably only exceeded by such shoals as the Goodwin Sands. Turn, then, to the North Pacific, and it will be seen that, with the exception of the higher northerly latitudes, through which lies the great circle track between San Francisco or Vancouver and Japan, that immense body of water is literally dusted with coral reefs and islands; though it is necessary to examine a large chart to appreciate this, as no geography will answer.