Much against his will, the lieutenant, thus rebuked on the quarter-deck in the presence not only of his own brother-officers, but in that of all of us on the deck below as well, had now to `eat humble pie' and give us the commodore's message; and, though Mick and I could not repress a grin on his bowing to us with mock politeness, we could see from the look in his underhung eyes that he intended to pay us out bye-and-bye when he had the chance for having been obliged to beg our pardon, as he had to do almost then. Unhappily, though, the permission for us to look over the side again came too late; for the thrasher and the swordfish had been too much for the poor whale, whose huge lifeless body was now floating away to leeward, half a cable's length astern of the ship, surrounded by an eddy of bloody water, while its assailants had both disappeared. "Begorrah," cried Mick, much disgusted at this, "sure, we're jist in toime to be too late!" In our passage from Madeira to the Canary Islands we steered south by west, in order to avoid the Salvages. These are a number of rocky islets, named the `Great Piton,' the `Little Piton,' and `Ilha Grande,' lying in latitude 30 degrees 8 minutes north, and longitude 15 degrees 55 minutes west. The largest island is covered with bushes, amongst which thousands of sea-fowl make their nests; and, from the fact of its not being seen until a ship be close in to it, when these very birds tell of its propinquity, by darkening the air almost as they rise, it is a great danger to mariners. A little farther to the eastward is Lanzarote, which is very mountainous, possessing a volcano of its own, where a violent eruption took place not very long ago, when a stream of lava from two hundred to three hundred yards broad spread out into the sea like a river, the floating pumice-stone being picked up by passing vessels miles away. For this piece of information I am indebted to the navigating officer, who happened to be telling one of the young midshipmen all about the place as I was attending to a job the boatswain had set me to aft. I also heard him tell the same young gentleman a queer yarn about a buried treasure which is supposed to be concealed near a little cove on the southern extremity of the island, called `Janubio.' The story goes that, in the beginning of the century--I think the navigator said it was in the year 1804, but I am not quite certain--the crew of a South American Spanish treasure ship, bound to Cadiz from Lima with produce and which had besides over two millions of dollars in chests aboard, mutinied, and murdered their captain and officers; the rascals then making off in the long boat with this treasure towards an island, which, from the description given, must have been either Lanzarote or one of the Salvages.