We continued working to the eastward until we were in longitude 170 degrees east, but the captain, not wishing to visit the Sandwich Islands, determined to leave this ground early, and finish out the season among the groups, recruiting at some island where he could drive a barter trade, in which our stock of tobacco and cloth could be made available. Up to the middle of August we had taken about five hundred barrels since leaving Strong's Island. In company with our old consort, the Leonidas, we steered to the southward, working down through those intricate and dangerous archipelagoes known as the Radack and Ralick chains of islands, where we carried sail days, and lay to nights with two men in the foretopmast crosstrees, and all the rest of the watch above the rail. Ragged reefs of coral, little more than flush with the surface of the sea, stretched here and there in unexpected directions, and sunken rocks waylaid us at every turn. At times we seemed to be embayed among these dangers, seeming the more formidable from the unpronounceable Russian names on the charts, while ever and anon a green islet with cocoanut trees popped into view, as if it had been forced up from the depths of the sea, while we had been looking for hidden dangers in another quarter of the horizon, and two or three canoes would dodge out from a lagoon, whence the only passage of egress seemed to us to have been by a submarine route under the reef of rocks. The old saying among us, "Where there's a cocoanut tree there's a Kanaka," though not infallible, held good through all this labyrinth. Sperm whales were seen several times, and in one instance we took two small whales and cut them with canoes alongside of us from a pretty little island, nestled among ugly reefs which stretched out like antennæ to draw luckless mariners into destruction. What it was called by the Russian officers I cannot now remember, but the name itself was ragged enough to bring a ship up all standing. We were not sorry when we had wound our way clear of these perils without accident, and emerged into a comparatively open sea.