At three, P.M., on the fourth of January, a rock was reported from the mast-head, eight leagues from us. It proved to be Ballard's Island, as it is called. At eight on the following morning, we passed within two hundred yards of it. It is about two or three hundred yards in circumference, and rises two hundred feet from the sea. On one side it has a considerable inclination, where seals had crawled up, and several were basking in the sun, almost to the very top. Large flocks of birds were perched upon its ragged sides, or wending their flight around it. Not the least sign of vegetation was any where to be seen. Near its base, was a small rock, from ten to twenty feet above the water level. Ballard's Rock rises in three equi-distant peaks, the centre of which is the highest, and all of them, to the very base, are white with bird-lime. A high surf breaks all around it. Our observations placed it in north latitude, twenty-five degrees two minuses; west longitude, one hundred and sixty-seven degrees fifty minutes. On the evening of January the fifth, the weather became squally, with constant flashes of lightning and distant thunder. From south to west, and N.W., the heavens were obscured with a heavy black cloud, which rose with great rapidity. We furled all sail. When the cloud ascended our zenith, it became perfectly calm, and a roaring was heard in the air for several minutes, like that of wind through the tops of pines, when hail-stones of an unusual size began to fall upon our deck, accompanied with very sharp lightning and heavy thunder. The hail was of short duration, and passed over without a breath of wind. The nearest of the Sandwich Group was Bird Island, for which we steered, and on the ninth of January, at eight in the morning (having the preceding night been enveloped in fog) it was discovered close to us. We tacked and stood close in with the south-west side, where was a small sand-beach, fifty to a hundred yards long.