If any seafaring person, such as a yachtsman, were to sail round the corner of Watkyns Bay in the morning, he would find large numbers of children playing in the water, and would be either pleased or depressed at the sight according to the way his nature was originally formed. Certainly he would wonder how they came to be there, in such a lonely place and so very much at home, the little ones splashing about in the shallow parts and chasing each other over the sand, and the bigger ones swimming out to rafts and diving from them, and all shouting and squeaking. But this is a case of supposing, for no yacht or any other vessel will ever round the corner of the bay and no sail will ever be seen on the skyline, the reason being that it is the land of the S.R.S.C. and therefore a place set apart. If a yachtsman were ever tempted to sail in that direction he would be met by baffling winds from the nor’-east, alternating with baffling winds from the sou’-west, and this, combined with the prevalence of waterspouts, would make him repent of his purpose, and he could consider himself lucky if he got out of those waters lashed to what was left of the mast.
There is one exception to the rule that no outsider can sail near there, and that is the case of Vanderdecken and his men, who put in and camped some two and a half miles north of the bay. Owing to his rash oath that he would beat round the Cape of Good Hope if he beat round it till Doomsday he found himself doing so, and though this was rough luck on his crew, who had not made any rash oaths, naturally they had to beat round with him. It is supposed that the curse wore thin after a few hundred years; at any rate they managed to slip into the waters of the S.R.S.C. during the vernal equinox, and there they are now, camped in little huts, with the ship anchored in the mouth of a river and in a shocking state of barnacles.