142 WHALING 



saw each other at rare intervals, and always under close watch. 

 Thus they managed, to exist, after a fashion, until, on Decem- 

 ber 23, 1825, a schooner anchored off the island and sent a 

 boat ashore. In Lay's story of his experience he tells in detail 

 what happened. 



The natives were much alarmed when the schooner first ap- 

 peared; but presently they naively formed a plan to swim out 

 to her, a few at a time, until perhaps two hundred had got on 

 board, v/ho at a given signal should throw all the white men into 

 the water. Lay, realizing that for the first time he had a fair 

 chance to escape, was bitterly disappointed when the natives 

 refused to take him with them. 



Only when he asserted that a vessel having but two masts 

 could not hail from his country, and that consequently he 

 could not speak the language of the strangers, did they let him 

 set out with them; and even then, when they came within 

 striking distance of the schooner, which Lay saw was armed, 

 they fell victims to the complaint sometimes called ''cold feet," 

 which appears to prevail in the Tropics as well as in the Arctic; 

 they paddled back to shore and hid him in a hut with some 

 forty women, and ordered them to guard him closely. 



''My fears and apprehensions," poor Lay writes, "were 

 now excited to a degree beyond human expression, and the kind 

 reader will pardon all attempts to express them." 



When the schooner, instead of showing signs of fear, boldly 

 sailed along the coast and sent out a boat, the natives them- 

 selves lost courage, and taking Lay along, fled at midnight, in 

 their canoes, to a remote part of the island many miles away. 

 But their flight was futile: on the morning of December 29th, 

 they discovered a sailboat standing in for the very place where 

 they were hidden. 



By this time Lay was nearly wild with fear lest once more, and 

 for ever, he be snatched away from under the very hands of 

 the white men. But, simulating quite other sentiments, he 

 assured the alarmed natives that he would fight on their side 

 against the strangers, and suggested — both he and they, it would 

 seem, had now forgotten that two-masted vessels came from a 



