midnight
No sooner said than done . As I had surmised , a party of twenty unwounded men , under the boatswain , had been left behind by the skipper to look after the camp when he had gone away early in the morning , and these men were now called in to convey the most seriously wounded down to the launch , while the less seriously hurt helped each other ; and in this way the whole of the occupants of the camp were got down to the launch and placed on board her in about twenty minutes . Then Hutchinson caused his medicine-chest to be taken down to the boat , together with such other matters as he thought might be useful ; and , lastly , poor Nugent 's body was taken down and reverently covered over with the ship 's ensign , which had been saved , laid on a rough , impromptu platform on the thwarts amidships -- the other poor fellows who had fallen in the fight had been buried before the setting-out of the boat expedition , I now learned . A final look round the camp was then taken by Purchase and Hutchinson ; a few more articles that were thought worth preserving from possible midnight raiders were brought down ; and then we got under way and stood up the river , keeping in the slack water as much as possible , in order to cheat the current . It was within an hour of sunset when Purchase , who had been standing up in the stern-sheets of the boat , intently studying the shore of the right bank of the river for some ten minutes , gave the order to douse the canvas and stand by to ship the oars ; and as he did so he waved his hand to the coxswain , who put down his helm and sheered the boat in toward what looked like an unbroken belt of mangroves stretching for miles along the bank . But as the launch , with plenty of way on her , surged forward , an opening gradually revealed itself ; and presently we slid into a creek , or channel , some two hundred feet wide , the margins of which were heavily fringed with mangroves , and at once found ourselves winding along this narrow passage of oil-smooth , turbid water , in a stagnant atmosphere of roasting heat that was redolent of all the odours of foetid mud and decaying vegetation . This channel proved to be about a mile long , and curved round gradually from a north-easterly to a south-easterly direction , ending in a fine spacious lagoon about eight miles long by from three to four miles wide at its widest point , arrived in which we once more felt the breeze and the sails were again set , the boat heading about south-east , close-hauled on the port tack , toward what eventually proved to be an island of very fair size , fringed with the inevitable mangroves , but heavily timbered , as to its interior , with magnificent trees of several descriptions , among which I distinguished several very fine specimens of the _ bombax _ .