Great was the disappointment of Waally when he ascertained, by personal examination, that the Summit could not be scaled, even by the most active of his party, without recourse to assistance, by means of artificial contrivances.  He had the sagacity to collect all his men immediately beneath the natural walls, where they were alone safe from the fire of the guns, but where they were also useless.  A large pile of iron, an article so coveted, was in plain sight, beneath a shed, but he did not dare to send a single hand to touch it, since it would have brought the adventurer under fire.  A variety of other articles, almost as tempting, though not perhaps of the same intrinsic value, lay also in sight, but were tabooed by the magic of powder and balls.  Eleven hundred warriors, as was afterwards ascertained, landed on the Reef that eventful morning, and assembled under the walls of the crater.  A hundred more remained in the canoes, which lay about a league off, in the western passage, or to leeward, awaiting the result of the enterprise.

The first effort made by Waally was to throw a force upward, by rearing one man on another’s shoulders.  This scheme succeeded in part, but the fellow who first showed his head above the perpendicular part of the cliff, received a bullet in his brains.  The musket was fired by the hands of Socrates.  This one discharge brought down the whole fabric, several of those who fell sustaining serious injuries, in the way of broken bones.  The completely isolated position of the crater, which stood, as it might be, aloof from all surrounding objects, added materially to its strength in a military sense, and Waally was puzzled how to overcome difficulties that might have embarrassed a more civilized soldier.  For the first time in his life, that warrior had encountered a sort of fortress, which could be entered only by regular approaches, unless it might be carried by a coup de main.  At the latter the savages were expert enough, and on it they had mainly relied; but, disappointed in this respect, they found themselves thrown back on resources that were far from being equal to the emergency.

Tired of inactivity, Waally finally decided on making a desperate effort.  The ship-yard was still kept up as a place for the repairing of boats, &c., and it always had more or less lumber lying in, or near it.  Selecting a party of a hundred resolute men, and placing them under the orders of one of his bravest chiefs, Waally sent them off, on the run, to bring as much timber, boards, planks, &c., as they could carry, within the cover of the cliffs.  Now, Betts had foreseen the probability of this very sortie, and had levelled one of his carronades, loaded to the muzzle with canister, directly at the largest pile of the planks.  No sooner did the adventurers appear, therefore, than he blew his match.  The savages were collected around the planks in a crowd, when he fired his gun.  A dozen of them fell, and the rest vanished like so much dust scattered by a whirlwind.