The islands of the archipelago we were now approaching partook much of the same character. After a run of three hundred miles we came to them, a group keeping remarkably equidistant from the mainland, as far as Wellesley in the Malay Peninsula. Exceedingly beautiful and tempting they looked, as we passed each in turn; all well wooded, their shores composed, as the mainland, of sand and rock, but the only signs of life came from a few birds flitting about the trees, and a stray turtle basking on the shore. Man had not set his mark on the place. As the steamer could not put us ashore we had to satisfy our curiosity by the aid of the glass. One island, the largest we had yet passed, was, so the captain told me, associated with that historical period when the French and ourselves were still trying conclusions as to which power was to be predominant in the East. An opening in the side facing the mainland led to a sort of basin in the interior of the island, a natural dock, which the French found very handy for their vessels under repairs. The British fleet was then in pursuit of them, and probably passed in sight of this identical island, never dreaming of the snug retreat within. Otherwise, it had gone badly with the French, who would have been caught in a trap; for a single British vessel would have sufficed to guard the entrance, until the enemy capitulated. As we surveyed each island in turn, striving in vain to distinguish some signs of higher animal life, and wondering why such beautiful spots should continue uninhabited, my thoughts wandered into the region of fancy, and pictured many things. So strong in me was the desire of leading a Robinson Crusoe kind of existence on one of them, that I must have given my thoughts audible expression, for I heard a voice beside me, “No, you wouldn’t; and if you did you’d be sorry for it!” I saw that the speaker was a merchant, the owner of a coasting vessel; and as he refused to explain his interruption, I might have considered it an impertinence on his part, but that his face betrayed unwonted sadness. For two days he made no further allusion to the subject, and I was left to speculate upon the probable cause of his emotion; someone he loved, perhaps, fell overboard opposite that identical island into the jaws of a ravenous shark. Or maybe, a quarrel arose among his Lascars, who forthwith ran amuck, staining his decks with blood, and branding his good ship with an evil reputation. Or, if both these conjectures were erroneous, he may have been driven ashore through carelessness or a storm, suffering thereby pecuniary loss as well as bodily injury.