glad to make a meal of his paws and skin, which, upon recollecting the spot where they had killed him, I found thrown aside and rotten.  The pressing calls of hunger drove our men to their wit’s end, and put them upon a variety of devices to satisfy it.  Among the ingenious this way, one Phipps, a boatswain’s mate, having got a water puncheon, scuttled it; then lashing two logs, one on each side, set out in quest of adventures in this extraordinary and original piece of embarkation.  By this means he would frequently, when all the rest were starving, provide himself with wild-fowl; and it must have been very bad weather indeed which could deter him from putting out to sea when his occasions required.  Sometimes he would venture far out in the offing, and be absent the whole day; at last, it was his misfortune, at a great distance from shore, to be overset by a heavy sea, but being near a rock, though no swimmer, he managed so as to scramble to it, and with great difficulty ascended it:  There he remained two days with very little hopes of any relief, for he was too far off to be seen from shore; but fortunately a boat, having put off and gone in quest of wild-fowl that way, discovered him making such signals as he was able, and brought him back to the island.  But this accident did not discourage him, but that soon after, having procured an ox’s hide, used on board for sifting powder, and called a gunner’s hide, by the assistance of some hoops he formed something like a canoe, in which he made several successful voyages.  When the weather would permit us, we seldom failed of getting some wild-fowl, though never in any plenty, by putting off with our boats; but this most inhospitable climate is not only deprived of the sun for the most part by a thick, rainy atmosphere, but is also visited by almost incessant tempests.  It must be confessed we reaped some benefit from these hard gales and overgrown seas, which drove several things ashore; but there was no dependence on such accidental relief; and we were always alert to avail ourselves of every interval of fair weather, though so little to be depended on, that we were often unexpectedly and to our peril overtaken by a sudden change.  In one of our excursions, I, with two more, in a wretched punt of our own making, had no sooner landed at our station upon a high rock, than the punt was driven loose by a sudden squall; and had not one of the men, at the risk of his life, jumped into the sea and swam on board her, we must in all probability have perished, for we were more than three leagues from the island at the time.  Among the birds we generally shot, was the painted goose, whose plumage is variegated with the most lively colours; and a bird much larger than a goose, which we called the racehorse, from the velocity with which it moved upon the surface of the water, in a sort of half-flying half-running motion.  But we were not so successful in our endeavours by land; for though we sometimes got pretty far into