Three months more the four unconquerable seamen lingered in their exile, at their wits’ ends to plan a way of escape, because the exodus to Buenos Aires had been given up as hopeless. Then they discovered a large trunk of a fallen tree on the beach, and conceived the wild notion of fashioning some kind of boat of it and hoisting a sail of sealskins sewed together with sinews. They had no tools whatever, barring a pocket-knife or two, but this could not discourage the handy mariners. John Duck happened to remember that during the first journey toward Buenos Aires eleven months before, he had thrown away his musket because the lock was broken. It occurred to one of them that the iron of the barrel might be pounded into something like a hatchet, and what did the quartet do but take a little seal meat and water and walk sixty miles to look for that musket. They found it, which was still more wonderful, and beat half the length of the barrel flat, using stones as hammer and anvil, and whetted an edge on the rough rocks. They were about to attack the project of making a boat when a dozen horses came galloping along the beach, and there were Indians on their backs. They were as astonished as the British seamen, but had no intention of shedding blood, and promptly whisked their prisoners up behind them. At a great pace the Indian horsemen rode several miles inland to a camp where a dozen of them were rounding up wild horses. It affords a glimpse of what the life had been in that hut on the Patagonian coast to hear Isaac Morris say: “We were treated with great humanity; they killed a horse, kindled a fire, and roasted part of it, which to us who had been eating raw flesh three months was most delicious entertainment. They also gave each of us a piece of an old blanket to cover our nakedness.” Two hundred miles back into the mountainous interior, where white men had never been seen, the wandering party of horse-hunting Indians carried the four sailors. These were sporting savages with a taste for gambling, and it is chronicled that “in this place we were bought and sold four different times, for a pair of spurs, a brass pan, ostrich feathers and such trifles, which was the low price generally set on each of us; and sometimes we were played away at dice, so that we changed masters several times in a day.”