They remained in Shark's Bay till the 10th, fruitlessly searching for fresh water; then coasting north-east, they fell in with a number of small rocky isles called Dampier's Archipelago, in latitude south about 20° 30´, and about 116° 30´ E. longitude. Here Dampier was so much struck with the character of the tides that he concluded there must be a passage to the south of New Holland and New Guinea to the eastward into the Great South Sea. His meaning is not clear, but then he is in the situation of a man who fires at a mark in the night; he misses, but the ball speeds in the right direction. Their pressing want was fresh water. Gangs of men were repeatedly sent ashore to seek it, but to no purpose. Their first sight of the natives was on August 31st. All sorts of signs of peace and friendship were made, but their gesticulations were probably too violent, and might even have grown alarming as contortions, and the wild men fled, menacing Dampier and his people as they ran. The only sort of intercourse they succeeded in establishing was a conflict. One of the barbarians was shot dead and an English sailor wounded. Dampier says, speaking of these natives, that they had the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people he ever saw, “though,” says he, “I have seen a great variety of Savages.” He judges that these New Hollanders were of the same race as the people he had previously met with in his first voyage round the globe, “for,” he exclaims, “the Place I then touched at was not above forty or fifty Leagues to the N.E. of this, and these were much the same blinking Creatures; here being also abundance of the same kind of Flesh-flies teasing them, and with the same black Skins and Hair frizzled, tall, thin, etc., as these were; but we had not the Opportunity to see whether these, as the former, wanted two of their fore Teeth.” It seems to me that he blackened his portraits of these uncomely people for the same reason that we find him later on describing the country sourly as though there had been little or nothing to admire; I mean with the wish to render the failure of his voyage less disappointing to his patrons at home. In short, he writes as if he would have people suppose that New Holland is a savage and worthless land, inhabited by loathsome monsters. One of the native princes he describes as painted with a circle of white pigment about his eyes, and a white streak down his nose, from the forehead to the tip of it. The breast and a portion of the arms were also whitened with the same paint. If Dampier do not exaggerate, then these embellishments which he portrays, supplementing the natural hideousness of the savages, might well cause the youthful Jack Tars who filled his forecastle to imagine themselves upon one of those enchanted, demon-haunted lands, from which the ancient mariner of the legends was wont to sail away with trembling despatch, his hair on end and his eyes half out of his head.