endeavour to dissuade them from killing him, as his faithful services and fondness deserved it at my hands; but, without weighing my arguments, they took him away by force and killed him; upon which, thinking that I had at least as good a right to a share as the rest, I sat down with them, and partook of their repast. Three weeks after that I was glad to make a meal of his paws and skin, which, upon recollecting the spot where they had killed him, I found thrown aside and rotten. The pressing calls of hunger drove our men to their wit's end, and put them upon a variety of devices to satisfy it. Among the ingenious this way, one Phips, a boatswain's mate, having got a water puncheon, scuttled it; then lashing two logs, one on each side, set out in quest of adventures in this extraordinary and original piece of embarkation. By this means he would frequently, when all the rest were starving, provide himself with wild fowl; and it must have been very bad weather indeed which could deter him from putting out to sea when his occasions required. Sometimes he would venture far out in the offing, and be absent the whole of the day: at last, it was his misfortune, at a great distance from shore, to be overset by a heavy sea; but being near a rock, though no swimmer, he managed so as to scramble to it, and with great difficulty ascended it: there he remained two days with very little hopes of any relief, for he was too far off to be seen from shore; but fortunately a boat, having put off and gone in quest of wild fowl that way, discovered him making such signals as he was able, and brought him back to the island. But this accident did not so discourage him but that soon after, having procured an ox's hide, used on board for sifting powder, and called a gunner's hide, by the assistance of some hoops he formed something like a canoe, in which he made several successful voyages. When the weather would permit us, we seldom failed of getting some wild fowl, though never in any plenty, by putting off with our boats; but this most inhospitable climate is not only deprived of the sun for the most part, by a thick, rainy atmosphere, but is also visited by almost incessant tempests. It must be confessed, we reaped some benefit from these hard gales and overgrown seas, which drove several things ashore; but there was no dependence on such accidental relief; and we were always alert to avail ourselves of every interval of fair weather, though so little to be depended on, that we were often unexpectedly and to our peril overtaken by a sudden change. In one of our excursions I, with two more, in a wretched punt of our own making, had no sooner landed at our station upon a high rock, than the punt was driven loose by a sudden squall; and had not one of the men, at the risk of his life, jumped into the sea and swam on board her, we must in all probability have perished; for we were more than three leagues from the island at the time. Among the birds we generally shot, was the painted goose, whose plumage is variegated with the most lively colours; and a bird much larger than a goose, which we called the race-horse, from the velocity with which it moved upon the surface of the water, in a sort of half flying, half running motion. But we were not so successful in our endeavours by land; for though we sometimes got pretty far into the woods, we met with very few birds in all our walks. We never saw but three woodcocks, two of which were killed by Mr. Hamilton, and one by myself. These, with some humming-birds, and a large kind of robin redbreast, were the only feathered inhabitants of this island, excepting a small bird with two very long feathers in his tail, which was generally seen amongst the rocks, and was so tame, that I have had them rest upon my shoulder whilst I have been gathering shell-fish. Indeed, we were visited by many birds of prey, some very large; but these only occasionally, and, as we imagined, allured by some dead whale in the neighbourhood, which was once seen. However, if we were so fortunate as to kill one of them, we thought ourselves very well off. In one of my walks, seeing a bird of this latter kind upon an eminence, I endeavoured to come upon it unperceived with my gun, by means of the woods which lay at the back of that eminence; but when I had proceeded so far in the wood as to think I was in a line with it, I heard a growling close by me, which made me think it advisable to retire as soon as possible; the woods were so gloomy I could see nothing; but as I retired, this noise followed me close till I had got out of them. Some of our men did assure me, that they had seen a very large beast in the woods; but their description of it was too imperfect to be relied upon. The wood here is chiefly of the aromatic kind; the iron wood, a wood of a very deep red hue, and another, of an exceeding bright yellow. All the low spots are very swampy; but what we thought strange, upon the summits of the highest hills were found beds of shells, a foot or two thick.

The long-boat being near finished, some of our company were selected to go out in the barge, in order to reconnoitre the coast to the southward, which might assist us in the navigation we were going upon. This party consisted of Mr. Bulkely, Mr. Jones, the purser, myself, and ten men. The first night, we put into a good harbour, a few leagues to the southward of Wager's Island; where finding a large bitch big with puppies, we regaled upon them. In this expedition we had our usual bad weather, and breaking seas, which were grown to such a height the third day, that we were obliged, through distress, to push in at the first inlet we saw at hand. This we had no sooner entered, than we were presented with a view of a fine bay, in which having secured the barge, we went ashore; but the weather being very rainy, and finding nothing to subsist upon, we pitched a bell tent, which we had brought with us, in the wood opposite to where the barge lay. As this tent was not large enough to contain us all, I proposed to four of the people to go to the end of the bay, about two miles distant from the bell tent, to occupy the skeleton of an old Indian wigwam, which I had discovered in a walk that way upon our first landing. This we covered to windward with sea-weed; and lighting a fire, laid ourselves down, in hopes of finding a remedy for our hunger in sleep; but we had not long composed ourselves before one of our company was disturbed by the blowing of some animal at his face, and upon opening his eyes, was not a little astonished to see, by the glimmering of the fire, a large beast standing over him. He had presence of mind enough to snatch a brand from the fire, which was now very low, and thrust it at the nose of the animal, who thereupon made off: this done, the man awoke us, and related, with horror in his countenance, the narrow escape he had had of being devoured. But though we were under no small apprehensions of another visit from this animal, yet our fatigue and heaviness was greater than our fears; and we once more composed ourselves to rest, and slept the remainder of the night without any further disturbance. In the morning, we were not a little anxious to know how our companions had fared; and this anxiety was increased upon tracing the footsteps of the beast in the sand, in a direction towards the bell tent. The impression was deep and plain, of a large round foot, well furnished with claws. Upon our acquainting the people in the tent with the circumstances of our story, we found that they too had been visited by the same unwelcome guest, which they had driven away by much the same expedient. We now returned from this cruise,