After frequenting the island for some years, the Portuguese relinquished it; the Dutch established themselves there, and subsequently abandoned it for the Cape of Good Hope; the British East Indian Company seized it; the Dutch retook it in 1672; the British occupied it anew and settled there. [Sidenote: St. Helena.] When João de Nova landed at St. Helena, the interior of the uninhabited country was mere forest land. Fernando Lopez, a Portuguese renegado, transported to that oasis, stocked it with cows, goats, hens, guinea-fowls and birds from the four corners of the earth. On to the island were taken successively, as on to the deck of the Ark, animals of the whole creation. Five hundred whites, fifteen hundred negroes, mingled with mulattoes, Javanese and Chinese, compose the population of the island. Jamestown is its town and its harbour. Before the English were masters of the Cape of Good Hope, the Company's fleets, returning from India, put in at Jamestown. The sailors spread their slop-goods at the foot of the cabbage-trees: the mute and solitary forest changed once a year into a noisy and populous market. The climate of the island is healthy but rainy: that dungeon of Neptune, which is only seven or eight leagues in circumference, attracts the ocean vapours. The equatorial sun drives away every breathing thing at noon-day, forces the very gnats into silence and rest, obliges men and beasts to hide themselves. The billows are illumined at night by what is called "the phosphorescent light," a light produced by myriads of insects whose loves, electrified by the storms, kindle upon the surface of the deep the illuminations of an universal wedding. The shadow of the island, dark and motionless, reposes amid a moving plain of diamonds. The spectacle of the heavens is similarly magnificent, according to my learned and famous friend, M. de Humboldt[390]: "We feel," he says, "an indescribable sensation when, on approaching the Equator, and particularly when passing from one hemisphere to the other, we see these stars, which we have contemplated from our infancy, progressively sink and finally disappear.... One feels that he is not in Europe, when he sees the immense constellation of the Ship or the phosphorescent Clouds of Magellan arise on the horizon.... "We saw distinctly," he continues, "for the first time the Southern Cross only on the night of the 4th of July, in the sixteenth degree of latitude.... "I recalled the sublime passage of Dante, which the most celebrated commentators have applied to that constellation: "Io mi volsi a man destra, etc.[391]" "Among the Portuguese and Spaniards, a religious feeling attaches them to a constellation whose form reminds them of that sign of the faith planted by their ancestors in the deserts of the New World." *