[Illustration: ANSON'S ENCAMPMENT AT TINIAN.] Anson gives a romantic account of the happy island of Tinian. The vegetation was not luxuriant and rank, but resembled the clean and uniform lawns of an English estate. The turf was composed of clover intermixed with a variety of flowers. The woods consisted of tall and wide-spreading trees, imposing in their aspect or inviting in their fruit. Three thousand cattle, milkwhite with the exception of their ears, which were black, grazed in a single meadow. The clamor and paradings of domestic poultry excited the idea of neighboring farms and villages. Both the cattle and the fowls were easily run down and captured, so that the Centurion husbanded her ammunition. The hogs were hunted by dogs trained to the pursuit, a number of which had been left by the Spaniards of Guam: they readily transferred their services and their allegiance to the English invaders. The island also produced in abundance the very best specifics for scorbutic disorders,--such as dandelion, mint, scurvy-grass, and sorrel. The inlets furnished fish of plethoric size and inviting taste; the lakes abounded with duck, teal, and curlew, and in the thickets the sportsmen found whole coveys of whistling plover. On the night of the 22d of September a violent storm drove the Centurion from her anchorage, sundering her cables like packthread. Anson was on shore, down with the scurvy; several of the officers, and a large part of the crew, amounting in all to one hundred and thirteen persons, were on shore with him. This catastrophe reduced all, both at sea and on land, to the utmost despair: those in the ship were totally unprepared to struggle with the fury of the winds, and expected each moment to be their last; those on shore supposed the Centurion to be lost, and conceived that no means were left them ever to depart from the island. As no European ship had probably anchored here before, it was madness to expect that chance would send another in a hundred ages to come. Besides, the Spaniards of Guam could not fail to capture them ere long, and, as their letters of marque were gone in the Centurion they would undoubtedly be treated as pirates.