The party from the schooner soon found they had got themselves into trouble, being cut off from their vessel by the Whitepaints, a race of savages thus named by Dr Coulter from their habit of disguising their dusky complexion with a ghastly coating of white. A battle was inevitable, and Connel disposed his forces with all the tact of an experienced general. About a thousand of the enemy were opposed to eight hundred and fifty Horraforas, but the latter had the Englishmen to help them, and especially Dr Coulter, who, with his terrible rifle, was a host in himself. The Whitepaints came on to within about four hundred yards of their foe, and halted, their chief still advancing and yelling defiance, in hopes of drawing the Horraforas from their cover on the verge of a forest. His appearance was any thing but prepossessing. He was "a giant of a man, hair and beard powdered with chalk, face painted black, and body white all over!" Connel implored his allies to render him a great service by picking off this ugly heathen, and inquired who was the best shot. Trainer named the doctor, who "had really no wish to pull a trigger, except in actual self-defence." But Trainer and Connel pressed him to fire, and at last overcame his scruples. With charming modesty, he avoids naming himself as the man who made the huge Papuan magpie bite the dust. "Thus urged by Connel," he says, "_one of our party_ rested his gun on the lower branch of a tree, took deliberate aim, and fired!" This "one of our party" was of course the doctor, the sailors being armed with short muskets, incapable of carrying so far. The shot took effect. Whitepaint ceased his capering, "stood fixed and upright like a daubed statue," and "was about receiving another shot (from the doctor's second barrel, we presume) when he fell heavily forward and lay motionless." Whereupon the Whitepaints advanced, and the six Englishmen "set to work in real earnest popping" off the cannibals. And soon becoming "madly excited by the scene, we continued to load and fire as fast as we could, accompanying almost every shot or volley with a Hurra! nearly as wild as the savage yell." Dr Coulter had got rid of his scruples, and Trainer and the seamen appear never to have had any. The latter "were eager to run down the mound for the purpose of enjoying a bayoneting match; but Trainer would not permit such folly, and told them to amuse themselves firing at them from where we were, which they did with great perseverance." The unfortunate Whitepaints were totally defeated, their tribe cut up root and branch, their women taken to wife by the victors, and themselves slung upon poles like rabbits and carried off to be buried, as Connel expressed it, in "the infernal stomachs" of their cannibal conquerors. The doctor and his companions being by no means anxious to witness the abominable feast, moved on with Connel, and, after a visit to the Whitepaint town, or rather rookery, the