ten o'clock
All the same , we shall need daylight for the job of taking the brig to the berth mentioned , so I shall stand on until four bells in the first watch , and then heave-to for the remainder of the night . At daylight we will fill away again and work round to the nor ' - west side of the island , when , if the water happens to be clear , we shall perhaps be able to see the bottom from aloft , and thus safely pilot the vessel to her anchorage . I will con her myself from the fore-topmast crosstrees . '' At four bells -- ten o'clock -- that night , the island showed through the clear darkness upon the horizon as an irregularly-shaped pyramid , with a peak nearly in the centre of it , rising to a height which I estimated at about six or seven hundred feet . The island itself was at that time some ten miles distant , and , measured from end to end , as we then looked at it , I took it to be about four miles across . We hove the brig to , and tried a cast first with the hand lead , and then with the deep-sea lead , but got no bottom , at which I was by no means surprised , as I had already heard that many of the islands in the Pacific -- especially those of coral formation -- rise sheer from the very bottom of the sea . At daybreak the next morning I was called by the steward , and , dressing , went on deck , to find that the weather was as it had been all through the preceding day , namely , a light breeze from the westward , with a cloudless sky of crystalline clearness overhead , and a long , low sluggish swell undulating athwart the gently-ruffled surface of the ocean .