VINCENNES TO OOMI. 287

captain, lest he might be detained by his friends ina kind of honourable captivity.

We intended to leave Taiohae on the fourth inst.,but on taking our anchors after breakfast, and at-tempting for an hour, with a light and baffling wind,to get out of the bay, we were obliged to return toour moorings and wait the land-breeze of an earlierhour the next day. Accordingly all hands werecalled yesterday at four o’clock in the morning, andwe cleared the harbour in a short time without dif-ficulty. Our course, for the six or eight miles in-tervening between Taiohae and Oomi, being directlyin the face of the trade-wind, we were obliged to beatup, and in doing it made two stretches into the midchannel between Nukuhiva and Uapou twenty-fiveor thirty miles south of it. We had fine views ofboth. The outline of Uapou is altogether the mostromantic, and is most singularly marked by two orthree elevated and wild peaks in the centre, one ofwhich rises in the proportions of a spire, leaningmuch on one side, to a perfect point, at least a thou-sand feet above the elevation of the general range.

By twelve o’clock we had approached near “ TowerBluff; ” and in the lights and shade we then sawit, a more magnificent object of the kind can scarcebe imagined. Though evidently a mass of dark lavaonly, the whole is so softened by a delicate moss ofgreen, interspersed with bushes in the crevices ofthe rocks and creeping plants richly mantling itsirregularities, that beauty is imparted to that whichotherwise might seem an unvaried deformity; andas to the tower, as we term it, and the parapeted