564 A FRACAS WITH THI NATIVES.

Upon this they took it for granted we all belonged to them, and
away they came down upon our men, as if it had been in a line of
battle.

Our men seeing so many of them, began to be frightened, for we
lay but in an ill posture to fight, and cried out to us to know what
they should do. I immediately called to the men who worked
upon the stage to slip them down and get up the side into the
ship, and bade those in the boat to row round and come on board;
and those few of us who were on board worked with all the
strength and hands we had to bring the ship to rights. But, how-
ever, neither the men upon the stage nor those in the boats could
do as they were ordered, before the Cochinchinese were upon
them; and two of their boats boarded our longboat, and began to
lay hold of the men as their prisoners.

The first man they laid hold of was an English seaman ; a stout,
strong fellow, who, having a musket in his hand, never offered to
fire it, but laid it down in the boat, like a fool as T thought. But
he understood his business better than [ could teacn him; for he
grappled the pagan, and dragged him by main force out of their
own boat into ours, where, taking him by the two ears, he beat
his head so against the boat’s gunwale, that the fellow died in-
stantly in his hands. And in the meantime, a Dutchman who
stood next took up the musket, and with the buty end of it
so laid about him, that he knowked down five of them who
attempted to enter the boat. But this was doiags little towards
resisting thirty or forty men, who, fearless, because ignorant of
their danger, began to throw themselves into the longboat, where
we had but five men in all to defend it. But one accident gave
our men a complete victory, which deserved our laughter rather
than anything else. And that was this.

Our carpenter being preparing to grave the outside of the ship,
as well as to pay the seams where he had calked her to stop the
leaks, had got two kettles just let down into the boat, one filled
with boiling pitch, and the other with rosin, tallow, and oil, and
such stuff as the shipwrights use for that work; and the man that
attended the carpenter had a great iron ladle in his hand, with
waich he supplied the men who were at work with that hot stuff.