Cruel indeed was the ill-luck of the crew of the four-masted barque _Dundonald_ which struck on the Aucklands in March 1907. They saw a cliff looming out just over their bows shortly after midnight. An attempt to wear the ship merely ended in her being hurled stern foremost into a kind of tunnel. The bow sank, and huge seas washed overboard the captain, his son, and nine of the crew. Sixteen took refuge in the tops, and one of them, a Russian, crept from a yard-arm on to a ledge of the cliff. After daylight a rope was flung to him and doubled, and along this bridge--sixty feet in air above the surges--fifteen men contrived to crawl. On reaching the summit of the cliff they discovered the full extent of their bad fortune. They had been cast away, not on the larger Aucklands, but on the peaked rock ominously named Disappointment Island. It contains but four or five square miles, and is five miles away from the next of the group. Heart-stricken at the discovery, the chief mate lay down and died in a few days. The second mate’s health also gave way. The carpenter and sail-maker, whose skill would have been worth so much to the castaways, had been drowned with the captain. A few damp matches and some canvas and rope were almost all that was saved from the ship before she disappeared in deep water. For seven months the survivors managed to live on Disappointment Island, showing both pluck and ingenuity. For a day or two they had to eat raw sea-birds. Then, when their matches had dried, they managed to kindle a fire of peat--a fire which they did not allow to expire for seven months. They learned a better way of cooking sea-fowl than by roasting them. At the coming of winter weather they dug holes in the peat, and building over these roofs of sods and tussock-grass, lay warm and dry thereunder. These shelters, which have been likened to Kaffir kraals, appear to have been modelled on Russian pig-sties. The seamen found a plant with large creeping stems, full of starch, and edible--by desperate men. When the seals came to the islands they mistook them for sea-serpents, but presently finding out their mistake, they lowered hunters armed with clubs to the foot of the cliffs, and learned, after many experiments, that the right place to hit a seal is above the nose. They found penguins tough eating, and seal’s flesh something to be reserved for dire extremity. Their regular ration of sea-birds, they said, was three molly-hawks a day for each man. As to that, one can only say, with Dominie Sampson, “Prodigious!” Searching their islet they lighted upon a crack in the ring of cliff where a waterfall tumbled into a quiet little boat-harbour, the bathing-pool of sea-lions. Then they determined to build a boat and reach that elysium, the main island, with its depôt of stores. With greased canvas and crooked boughs cut from the gnarled veronica, which was their only timber, they managed to botch up something between a caricature of a