232 Pickering on the Language and Inhabitants 
this he had his hands tied behind him, and was put into a canoe 
and sent adrift; this, it seems, was their usual punishment for va- 
rious offences. 
By these successive deaths, the only remaining survivors were 
now two of the seamen, Holden and Nute, and the Pelew chief, 
Kobac, who had become so much attached to them, that he seemed 
like a brother, and this fidelity and affection had produced a recip- 
rocal friendship for him. When they left the island, this estimable 
chief was but just alive. 
After dragging out a miserable existence on the island for two 
years, and having become so emaciated and feeble as to be un- 
able to labor, and therefore of no further use, the two surviving 
Americans succeeded in persuading the natives to exempt them 
from working, and to agree to put them on board of the first ves- 
sel that should come to the island. But they were at the same time 
told, that if they did not work they should not have even the mis- 
erable allowance of cocoa-nuts which they had thus far shared. 
They crawled from place to place, subsisting upon leaves, and now 
and then begging a morsel of cocoa-nut. 
In this wretched condition they remained for two months longer, 
when they received the reviving intelligence that a vessel was in 
sight and approaching the island. They prevailed upon the island- 
ers to visit the ship, which was found to be the British bark Bri- 
tannia, then on her way to Canton, under the command of Captain 
Henry Short, who published, at Lintin, a short statement of his 
passing the island on the 27th of November, 1834, and receiving 
the two survivors on board of his ship. 
It appears, that while off the island, he observed ten or eleven 
canoes, containing upwards of one hundred men, approaching the 
vessel, in a calm, or nearly so, with the intention of coming along- 
