The skipper of the China ship, a half-caste with a crew of Lascars, was a surly customer who seemed anxious to be rid of his visitors. As a friend in need he was a glaring failure. Protesting that he had no fresh water to spare, all that their money could buy of him was a bottle of brandy and twelve musket-cartridges. The Yankee sailors tugged at the oars all day long, but caught never a glimpse of the missing _Enterprise_. At nightfall they landed on an island and found water fit to drink, but nothing to eat. A large fire was built on the beach in the hope of attracting the attention of their ship, but there was no responsive signal. It was the land of Conrad’s magic fancies, where “the swampy plains open out at the mouth of rivers, with a view of blue peaks beyond the vast forests. In the offing a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, stand out in the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a wall broached by the sea.” The chief mate and his five hardy seamen tightened their leather belts another hole and shoved off again in the small open boat. For six days they sailed the Straits, blown along by one rain squall after another, until they were within sight of the coast of Celebes. Hunger and thirst then compelled them to seek the land and risk death at the hands of the savage Malays. It was their hope to proceed by sea to Macassar, which they reckoned lay about three degrees to the southward. They must have had a little water during these six days, but David Woodard’s statement that the rations were a few cocoanuts is entirely credible. Many a boat-load of castaways has died or gone mad after privations no more severe, while on the other hand a crew of toughened seamen, in the prime of their youth, is exceedingly hard to kill. Toward a cove on this unknown, hostile shore of Celebes the gaunt sailors wearily steered their boat and beached it in the languid ripple of surf. They had no sooner crawled ashore than two proas skimmed in from seaward, dropping anchor and making ready to send off a canoe filled with armed Malays. Woodard shouted to his men, and they pushed the boat out and scrambled into it before they were discovered. Skirting a bight of the shore, they headed for the open sea and dodged away from the proas.