Two or three days of assiduous attention to the oysters, and they were ready to put to sea again, with water-breakers filled. Before they shoved off, Bligh directed all hands to attend prayers; so they knelt on the beach with bared heads while he read service from the Church of England prayer-book. A group of natives, black and naked, came scampering out of the forest just as the boat took the water, but there was no clash with them. As they steered through the mazes of the Malay Archipelago, many small islands swam in the seas of azure and emerald, and they ventured to land again. Here Bligh had the first trouble with the tempers of his sick and weary men. “When ordered to go scouting for food, one of them went so far as to tell me, with a mutinous look, that he was as good a man as myself,” relates this inflexible commander who had made such a sorry mess of things in the _Bounty_. He added: “It was impossible for me to judge where this might end, therefore to prevent such disputes in future I determined either to preserve my authority or die in the attempt. Seizing a cutlass I ordered him to take hold of another and defend himself; on which he cried out that I was going to kill him and immediately made concessions. I did not allow this to interfere further with the harmony of the boat’s crew and everything soon became quiet.” For a week they coasted along New Holland in this manner before risking the open sea again. They caught some turtle and went ashore at night to hunt the noddies, or sea-birds, and knock them over on their nests. One of the sailors, Robert Lamb, stole away from his companions, contrary to orders, and blundered into the birds, which fled away. Much provoked, Bligh gave the culprit a drubbing and made him confess that he had eaten nine noddies raw. It goes without saying that greedy Robert Lamb promised not to do it again. Much more sanguine of some day reaching the destination of Timor, the argonauts endured another long stretch of the voyage, almost two thousand miles more, but it was fast breaking the strength which they had so amazingly displayed. Surgeon Ledward and Lawrence Lebogue, a hardy old salt, seemed to have come to the end, and Bligh nursed them with teaspoonfuls of wine and crumbs of bread that he had been saving for such emergencies. He now began to fear that the party could not survive to finish the voyage, and mentioned that extreme weakness, swelled legs, hollow and ghastly countenances, with an apparent debility of understanding, seemed to me the melancholy presages of approaching dissolution. The boatswain very innocently told me that he really thought I looked worse than any one in the boat. I was amused by the simplicity with which he uttered such an opinion and returned him a better compliment.