keep the vessel's head from striking. It was a time of most trying
excitement for me, and I wonder to this day how it was that the
Veielland did not strike and founder then and there, considering,
firstly, that she was virtually a derelict, and secondly, that
there was no living creature on board to navigate her save myself.

I was beginning to despair of ever pulling the vessel through, when
we suddenly entered a narrow strait. I knew that I was in a
waterway between two islands--Apsley Strait, dividing Melville and
Bathurst Islands, as I have since learned.

The warlike and threatening natives had now been left behind long
ago, and I never thought of meeting any other hostile people, when
just as I had reached the narrowest part of the waterway, I was
startled by the appearance of a great horde of naked blacks--
giants, every one of them--on the rocks above me.

They were tremendously excited, and greeted me first of all with a
shower of spears. Fortunately, on encountering the first lot of
threatening blacks, I had prepared a shelter for myself on deck by
means of the hatches reared up endwise against the stanchions, and
so the spears fell harmlessly around me. Next, the natives sent a
volley of boomerangs on board, but without any result. Some of
these curious weapons hit the sails and fell impotently on the
deck, whilst some returned to their throwers, who were standing on
the rocks about fifty yards away, near the edge of the water. I
afterwards secured the boomerangs that came on board, and found
that they were about twenty-four inches in length, shaped like the
blade of a sickle, and measured three or four inches across at the
widest part.