eless young
man asked me if I could manage, besides other things, a few cans of
milk and a cheese. When I offered my Montevideo gold for the supplies,
the captain roared like a lion and told me to put my money up. It was
a glorious outfit of provisions of all kinds that I got.

[Illustration: A contrast in lighting--the electric lights of the
_Colombia_ and the canoe fires of the Fortescue Indians.]

Returning to the _Spray_, where I found all secure, I prepared for an
early start in the morning. It was agreed that the steamer should blow
her whistle for me if first on the move. I watched the steamer, off
and on, through the night for the pleasure alone of seeing her
electric lights, a pleasing sight in contrast to the ordinary Fuegian
canoe with a brand of fire in it. The sloop was the first under way,
but the _Colombia_, soon following, passed, and saluted as she went
by. Had the captain given me his steamer, his company would have been
no worse off than they were two or three months later. I read
afterward, in a late California paper, "The _Colombia_ will be a total
loss." On her second trip to Panama she was wrecked on the rocks of
the California coast.

The _Spray_ was then beating against wind and current, as usual in the
strait. At this point the tides from the Atlantic and the Pacific
meet, and in the strait, as on the outside coast, their meeting makes
a commotion of whirlpools and combers that in a gale of wind is
dangerous to canoes and other frail craft.

A few miles farther along was a large steamer ashore, bottom up.
Passing this place, the sloop ran into a streak of light wind, and
then--a most remarkable condition for strait weather--it fell entirely
calm. Signal-fires sprang up at once on all sides, and then more than
twenty canoes hove in sight, all heading for the _Spray_. As they came
within hail, their savage crews cried, "Amigo yammerschooner," "Anclas
aqui," "Bueno puerto aqui," and like scraps of Spanish mixed with
their own jargon. I had no thought of anchoring in their "good port."
I hoisted the sloop's flag and fired a gun, all of which they might
construe as a friendly salute or an invitation to come on. They drew
up in a semicircle, but kept outside of eighty yards, which in
self-defense would have been the death-line.

In their mosquito fleet was a ship's boat stolen probably from a
murdered crew. Six savages paddled this rather awkwardly with the
blades of oars which had been broken