134 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



vow may have been all that was wise and becoming ; 

 but it was made only after they had attained the full 

 conviction that they were come to their last hour. 

 An oath against public vengeance, made by a boatful 

 of fugitives in the last extremities of famine on the 

 ocean, and utterly in despair of life, was surely melo- 

 dramatic and French. But, live or die, a Frenchman 

 is always on the stage. 



But a breeze came next day and swept them on, 

 though much bewildered by the currents, and kept 

 in continual terror by a whole host of sharks, which 

 already marked them for their prey, and continued 

 all day splashing and bounding round their canoe. 

 On the fifth day they reached Fort Orange ; but here 

 they were put in a new peril, which might have 

 extinguished them at once. 



The vigilance of the Dutch artillerymen received 

 their little vessel with a fire of heavy guns loaded 

 with ball, any one of which would have sent ship and 

 freight to the bottom in a moment. This display of 

 hostility was scarcely necessary to a solitary canoe 

 with a few half-naked and more than half-dying men. 

 It drove off the invasion, however. The canoe put 

 out, and sailed, in the hope that at Mont Krick, a 

 settlement higher up the coast, the artillerymen would 

 be less vigilant or less frightened. But Mont Krick 

 they were not destined to reach so easily ; the clouds 

 suddenly lowered, the wind rose, the waves swelled, 

 a storm came on, which, if it had found them in any 



