The Cutting off of the “ Boyd.” 
87 
among themselves. The salt provisions, flour, 
and spirits they threw overboard, considering 
them useless. The muskets they prized very 
much, and one of the savages, in his eagerness 
to try one, stove in the head of a barrel of gun¬ 
powder, and filling the pan of the piece snapped 
it directly over the cask ! In an instant the 
powder exploded, and killed five native women 
and nine men, and set the ship on fire. Her 
cables were then cut, and she was allowed to 
drift ashore. 
Of the rescued survivors of this dreadful 
massacre, Mrs. Morley died ten months later at 
Valparaiso; her child, when grown to woman¬ 
hood, kept a school in Sydney. Miss Broughton 
became Mrs. Charles Throsby, of Sydney ; and 
Davis, the boy, was drowned at Shoalhaven in 
the colony of New South Wales, in May, 1822. 
And to-day, when the tide is low, the brown¬ 
skinned descendants of the Maoris who cut off 
the ill-fated Boyd will show you her weed- 
covered timbers protruding from the mud— 
silent witnesses of one of the many tragedies 
of the Southern Seas. 
