Mysterious Disappearances by W. Clark Russell

"Land in your eye! " said the mate, who was looking through the / telescope. -_Two Years Before the Mast._

Something of humour goes to the fancy of a shipmaster homeward bound / with a mind oppressed by the discovery of land that is literally "all in / his eye. " The emotions excited by Samuel Weller's lantern in the soul of / the scientific gentleman would be trifling compared with the _fine_ / triumph of a man who is the first to discover land. Though it be but a / rock-nay, a reef or shoal-is it not a surer hand than that of the / greatest poet for the carrying of one's name down to the remotest / posterity? What as a memorial so excellent and enduring as a piece of / mother-earth? Every new chart enlarges the bounds of the discoverer's / fame. Take such a man as Bugsby. In what old black-letter book the life / of him lies pierced through and through by worms I know not. I might / search Limehouse and Poplar and find no oldest inhabitant able to tell / me a word about Bugsby, whether he was a great merchant or a haggard / water-thief, whether he fetched his last breath in Execution Dock, or / died very honestly in a four-poster. Yet so long as the silver Thames / continues to flow, so long (I am afraid) will its translucent / tide-particularly in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks and the / aromatic Isle of Dogs-go on murmuring the elegant name of Bugsby. / Bugsby's Reach! Think of the enormous fame of Bugsby! Then should not a / master-mariner, sailing home with an entry concerning a discovery of / land in his log-book, feel extremely boastful and happy? Supposing it to / be, as it almost always is in this age of an exhausted world, an island / or a rock entirely "in his eye: " it will be the same to him; he will go / to his grave as cocksure about it as if he had landed, hoisted the Union / Jack, taken possession of it in the Queen's name, and called it by his / own.