Four days more they rowed on until they came into the river Amana, which ran more directly, without windings and twistings, than the other, and then a fresh difficulty met them. For the flood of the sea no longer gave any help and "we were enforced either by main strength to row against a violent current or to return as wise as we went out." The men complained that the work was too much for them; but they consented to pull on when Ralegh and the other captains and gentlemen offered to take each his turn at the oar. Each spell of rowing lasted one hour. Thus they proceeded slowly and with tremendous effort for three more days, when the men began to despair; the current became each day stronger and the river appeared interminable in length. "But we evermore commanded our pilots to promise an end by next day, and used it so long as we were driven to assure them from four reaches of the river to three, and so to two, and so to the next reach." The men, too, were hungry; food was giving out; the sun was scorching, and there was nothing to drink but the thick and troubled water of the river. Sometimes they found fruits on the trees that were good to eat; sometimes they shot birds. Birds there were of every brilliant colour, "carnation, crimson, orange-tawny, purple, green watchet, and of all sorts, both simple and mixt, as it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them." But the men were hungry and tired. Then a pilot, the very old man, whom they had hand-fasted, said that he would bring them soon to a town of the Arwacas, where they would find a store of bread, hens, fish, and the wine of the country, if they would turn with their barge and wherries down a branch of the river on the right hand. The men were cheered at the prospect. Ralegh and Gifford and Calfield determined to make their way to the town for food; so, leaving the majority of their men at the river's entrance, they set out. They rowed three hours without seeing a sign of human life, and they began to suspect that the pilot was playing them false. It grew towards night, but still he kept assuring them that the village lay only four reaches farther on. "When we had rowed four and four we saw no sign, and our poor watermen even, heartbroken and tired, were ready to give up the ghost; for we had now come from the galleye near forty miles."