The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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forgotten deadlights, and the steersman stood spinning the wheel for his
life in a halo of tropical rain."

After twenty-two days at sea they sighted their first island, Nukahiva,
one of the Marquesan group, and were all on deck before dawn anxiously
watching for it. They not only looked forward eagerly to the sight of
land again after so many days on the open ocean, but it was indeed an
adventure to come to a country totally strange to all of them, where
few white people had been before.

"Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the Islands," says
Stevenson, "or knew except by accident one word of any of the island
tongues; and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure
as thrilled the bosom of the discoverers that we drew near these
problematic shores.

"Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the