276 DOTTINGS ON THE ROADSIDE. [Chap. XVII.— B. P. 
and reached the deck; the ship was rolling very little 
when he arrived, hut he groped about in the evident 
fear of falling, putting his hands to his head, placing 
his feet wide apart, and only taking a step forward 
with the greatest caution. Any one who has seen 
a captured albatross on the deck, and noticed its awk¬ 
ward attempts to move, and its utter inability to fly, 
or the action of a booby in the same position, can 
realize what I have feebly attempted to describe as to 
the utter bewilderment of this Indian; and yet he 
quite unconsciously elicited the warm admiration of 
our seamen by the ease and grace with which he 
moved about in his miserable cockleshell of a canoe, 
walking steadily and perfectly upright from the stern 
to raise the mast when we started, and, in fact, seem¬ 
ing by his presence alone to give that life and buoy¬ 
ancy to his frail, craft which it certainly did not possess 
before, and which none of my bronzed and hardy 
sailors, who had a world-wide experience of the sea all 
over the globe, could ever have imparted to it; an 
admission made by more than one who a short time 
before had been irresistibly provoked to laughter at 
the, to them, novel sight of a man quite bewildered at 
finding himself on the deck of a ship. 
On leaving the 1 Gorgon ’ I observed that the canoe 
fell away to leeward considerably, in spite of her huge 
sail; and we arrived in the gig at the bar and crossed 
it some time before the Indian, yet he did not keep us 
waiting many minutes at Cassava Cay, owing, no 
doubt, to his intimate local acquaintance with the set 
of the current, although he had to “paddle his own 
canoe” alone. 
