The _Dainty_ was now all alone, and on the 19th of February 1594 entered the Straits of Magellan. At the Penguin Islands they stored the ship with these birds, salted like beef in casks. The hunting of them proved a great source of amusement to the crew; as each, armed with a cudgel, advanced and drove the silly things into a ring. Whenever one chanced to break out, divers of the men would run and try to head it round; but the ground was so undermined with their burrows that ofttimes it failed unawares, and as they ran you could see first one man and then another fall and sink up to his armpits in the earth; while another, leaping to avoid one hole, would disappear into another amidst the uproarious laughter of the rest. Indeed, so funny an appearance did they make, that many could run no more, but stopped to hold their sides for laughter. And Sir Richard concludes thus: "After the first slaughter, on seeing us on the shore, the penguins shunned us and tried to recover the sea; yea, many times, seeing themselves persecuted, they would tumble down from such high rocks as it seemed impossible to escape with life. Yet as soon as they came to the beach, presently we should see them run into the sea, as though they had no hurt; but in getting them once within the ring close together few escaped--and ordinarily there was no drove which yielded us not a thousand or more." In another part of the island was a colony of ducks, which had made their nests of earth and water fetched in their beaks. These were so closely set that "the greatest mathematician could not devise to place one more than there was, leaving only one pathway for a fowl to pass betwixt ... and all the nests and passages were so smooth and clean, as if they had been newly swept and washed." Before Hawkins left the western end of the Straits, finding the boards beginning to open from the great heat of the line, he calked the ship within board and without above the decks, from post to stern: the manner of sheathing the hull which his father, Sir John, had invented, preserved the keel from the attack of worms. One accident caused some anxiety, when the _Dainty_ struck on a rock amidships and hung there, having deep water both ahead and astern. Not till the flood came could they warp her off, somewhat strained and damaged. Of five anchors brought from England, Hawkins had now lost two, and two others were disabled, and as bitter weather came on, with sleet and snow, the men craved to return to Brazil and winter there; but Hawkins, having Fenton's fortune in mind and that of Cavendish, resolved to go on and rather lose his life than listen to their counsel.