Discovery of Queen Charlotte's Island
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Such was the story of the Master, who, with three of my best seamen, died some time afterwards of the wounds they had received; but culpable as he appears to have been by his own account, he appears to have been still more so by the testimony of those who survived him. They said, that the Indians behaved with the greatest confidence and friendship till he gave them just cause of offence, by ordering the people that were with him, who had been regaled in one of their houses, to cut down a cocoa-nut tree, and insisting upon the execution of his order, notwithstanding the displeasure which the Indians strongly expressed upon the occasion: as soon as the tree fell, all of them except one, who seemed to be a person of authority, went away; and in a short time a great number of them were observed to draw together into a body among the trees, by a Midshipman who was one of the party that were on shore, and who immediately acquainted the Master with what he had seen, and told him, that from the behaviour of the people he imagined an attack was intended: that the Master made light of the intelligence, and inflead of repairing, immediately to the boat, as he was urged to do, fired one of his pistols at a mark: that the Indian who had till that time continued with them then left them abruptly, and joined the body in the wood: that the Master, even after this, by an infatuation that is altogether unaccountably continued to trifle away his time on shore, and did not attempt to recover the boat till the attack was begun.
As the expedition to find a better place for the ship had issued thus unhappily, I determined to try what could be done, where we lay; the next day therefore, the ship was brought down by the stern, as far as we could effect it, and the carpenter, the only one of the crew who was in tolerable health, caulked the bows, as far down as he could come at the bottom; and though he did not quite stop the leak, he very much reduced it. In the afternoon a fresh gale set right into the bay, which made the ship ride with her stern very near the shore, and we observed a great number of the natives sculking among the trees upon the beach, who probably expected that the wind would have forced the ship on shore.
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Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from Volume I of the London 1773 Edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, pages 573 - 574, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/hv01/573.html