nearly two
o'clock in the afternoon
As for us , the general and I each had a sword , the _ Sharks _ carried a cutlass apiece , and every man of us also had a brace of pistols in his belt , and a pocketful of cartridges . But what I most trusted to for the creation of a good , wholesome panic among the savages was a dozen signal rockets which I had found in the ship 's magazine . Our arrangements being now complete , the general bade a hasty good-bye to his wife and daughter , who bore themselves very bravely upon the occasion , and we all tumbled down over the side into the longboat -- into which Briggs had already , with commendable forethought , passed a large basket of provisions for the sustenance of ourselves and such of the mutineers as we might be fortunate enough to rescue . It was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon when we shoved off . It took us but a few minutes to reach the river entrance , passing through which we presently found ourselves in a broad , lagoon-like expanse of water , some two miles long by about a mile wide , dotted here and there with small , tree-clad islands , some of which might have been as much as ten or twelve acres in extent , while others were mere heaps of mud just large enough to support a clump of half a dozen or so of coconut trees and a tiny thicket of bamboo . The greater part of this lagoon was evidently very shallow , for dotted about here and there were to be seen partially submerged trunks of trees and other debris that appeared to have been swept down into their present position by some bygone flood , and had ultimately grounded on the mud ; but there was just sufficient current and wind to reveal a deep-water channel of about two hundred yards wide , running in a fairly straight line through the lagoon toward its most distant extremity . There were numerous objects dotted about the surface of the lagoon , which , at a distance , had all the appearance of floating logs , but which , when we drew near to them , proved to be , in almost every instance , the heads of basking alligators .