In the morning of the 12th the wind blew from the N.W.; in the forenoon I rowed to the land myself with the two pinnaces well-manned and armed, in order to see if there was anything worth note there; but when we had got within a musket-shot of the land, the water became so shallow that we could not get any farther, whereupon we all of us went through the mud up to our waists, and with extreme difficulty reached the beach, where we saw a number of fresh human foot-prints; on going a short distance into the wood, we also saw twenty or more small huts made of dry grass, the said huts being so small and cramped that a man could hardly get into them on all fours, from which we could sufficiently conclude that the natives here must be of small stature, poor and wretched; we afterwards tried to penetrate somewhat {Page 30} farther into the wood, in order to ascertain the nature and situation of the country, when on our coming upon a piece of brushwood, a number of blacks sprang out of it, and began to let fly their arrows at us with great fury and loud shouts, by which a carpenter was wounded in the belly and an assistant in the leg: we were all of us hard pressed, upon which we fired three or four muskets at them killing one of the blacks stone-dead, which utterly took away their courage; they dragged the dead man into the wood, and we, being so far from the pinnaces and having a very difficult path to go in order to get back to them, resolved to return and row back to the yachts. (The Valsch Caep is 8 degrees 15 minutes south of the equator and 70 miles S.E. of Aru.) The The same day at low tide we saw a large sandbank, S.E., S., and S.W. of us, where we had been with the yacht on the 11th last, the said sandbank extending fully 4 miles W., S.W. and W. by S. of the land or foreland; on which account we have in the new chart given to the same the name of de Valsch Caep [*]; it is in Lat. 8° 15' South, and about 70 miles east of Aru. [* The South-west point of Prince Frederik Hendrik island.] * * * NOTE That the land which we have touched at as above mentioned, is low-lying and half-submerged to northward, so that a large part of it is under water at high tide; to the south it is somewhat higher and inhabited by certain natives who have built huts there; so far as we could ascertain the land is barren, covered with tall wild trees; the natives quite black and naked without any covering to hide their privy parts; their hair curly in the manner of the Papues: they wear certain fish-bones through the nose, and through their ears pieces of tree-bark, a span in length, so that they look more like monsters than like human beings: their weapons are arrows and bows which they use with great skill. * * *