Mi ADVENTURE IN NEW ZEALAND. Chap. XIV. 
the fact that I agreed to pay 100/. for three months' 
use of this little boat, the owner paying the wages of 
the skipper only ; and these wages were 6/. per month, 
besides food and grog. The two other men's wages 
were 4/. per month each. 
Mr. Bidwill and Mr. Dudley Sinclair, wishing to 
see something of the other parts of Cook's Strait, 
accompanied me in the trip ; and on the morning of 
the 7th, having embarked the requisite goods for 
■barter, and provisions for the voyage, we sailed for 
Cloudy Bay, where I had agreed to land Williams. 
-With a fresh north-west breeze, we buffeted through a 
rough tide-rip off Sinclair Head, and anchored at night 
in the cove above Jacky Guard's, where Williams had 
established himself The next day I visited my old 
acquaintances. Guard had got a new house, which he 
had built as a grog-shop, to accommodate the increas- 
ing whaling traffic of the Bay. The season having 
just closed, the place was exceedingly quiet. Most of 
the whalers had gone to spend the balance of their 
earnings in Port Nicholson, or were employed by the 
settlers there, as sawyers, carpenters, boatmen, or 
otherwise. 
A startling piece of news was conveyed to us while 
here. Mr. Wilton, the agent of a Sydney house, whom 
I have already described as prevented by the natives 
from entering the TVairau plain with his cattle, had 
lost his life at the mouth of that river, together with 
the rest of a boat's crew. Whether this had happened 
by the upsetting of the boat or in another way, no one 
of the party remained alive to say ; but blood-stained 
«lothes, and some of the articles which had been in the 
boat, found dry on the beach, led the White people to 
opine that there had been some foul play ; and that the 
fragments of the boat, also found upon the beach, were 
