To let the sailors go ashore with us, we drew up the boat on the rock several feet, and made it fast with a line knotted into a crevice between two fragments of flinty sienite rock at the foot of the crags.

We then, with considerable difficulty and mutual "boosting," clambered up to the top of the cliffs, thirty or forty feet above the boat, and thence made our way up to the summit of a bald peak half a mile from the shore, which promised a good prospect of the surrounding islands.

It is hardly possible to give an idea of the desolate aspect of these ledgy islets.
There was absolutely no soil, no earth, on them.

More than half the surface was bare as black sienite could be.

Huge leathery lichens hung to the rocks in patches; and so tough were they, that one might pull on them with his whole strength without tearing them.