The wind was too strong for the fragile canoe, and they had to seek refuge in the mouth of a river, where they built a fire to cook some rice. Here they encountered two natives who had come ashore from a trading proa, one of them a captain who had seen the fugitives while at Tomboa. He insisted that they surrender and return with him. Tired of so much interference, the chief mate knocked him down, and held a knife at his throat until the Malay mariner changed his opinion. The proa chased them, however, when the canoe resumed its voyage; but night came on, and a thunder squall enabled them to slip away undiscovered. Eight days after leaving Tomboa they began to pass many towns and a great deal of shipping on the coast of Celebes, but they doggedly kept on their course to Macassar. They fought off a war-canoe, which attacked them with arrows and spears, but had no serious misadventures until a large boat came swiftly paddling out of an inlet and fairly overwhelmed them by force of numbers. Captives again, the five long-suffering seafarers were carried into Pamboon, where the rajah found them unsatisfactory to interview. David Woodard, chief mate, was in no mood to be thwarted, and it is related of him that “he was examined in the presence of the rajah and all the head men of the place. He made the same answers as before, saying that he must not be stopped and must go on immediately, thus being more desperate and confident from the dangers and escapes he had experienced. The rajah asked him if he could use a musket well, which he denied, having formerly found the inconvenience of acknowledging it. The rajah then showed him a hundred brass guns, but he declined taking charge of them. His wife, a young girl, sat down by the mate and, calling her sister and about twenty other girls, desired them to sit down, and asked Woodard to select a wife from among them. This he refused and, rising up, bade her good night and went out of the house, where they soon brought him some supper.” In the morning this redoubtable Yankee mate who, like Ulysses, was deaf to the songs of the sirens and was also as crafty as he was brave, waited on the rajah of Pamboon and very courteously addressed him in the Malay tongue, requesting prompt passage to Macassar on the ground that the Dutch governor had urgently summoned him, and if he were detained at Pamboon, it would be most unpleasant for the rajah, whose proas would be seized and his ports blockaded, no doubt, by way of punishment.