trash to them, they had no value for it; so that we were in a fair way to
be starved. Had we had but some toys and trinkets, brass chains, baubles,
glass beads, or, in a word, the veriest trifles that a shipload of would
not have been worth the freight, we might have bought cattle and provisions
enough for an army, or to victual a fleet of men-of-war; but for gold or
silver we could get nothing.

Upon this we were in a strange consternation. I was but a young fellow, but
I was for falling upon them with our firearms, and taking all the cattle
from them, and send them to the devil to stop their hunger, rather than be
starved ourselves; but I did not consider that this might have brought ten
thousand of them down upon us the next day; and though we might have killed
a vast number of them, and perhaps have frighted the rest, yet their own
desperation, and our small number, would have animated them so that, one
time or other, they would have destroyed us all.

In the middle of our consultation, one of our men who had been a kind of a
cutler, or worker in iron, started up and asked the carpenter if, among all
his tools, he could not help him to a file. "Yes," says the carpenter, "I
can, but it is a small one." "The smaller the better," says the other. Upon
this he goes to work, and first by heating a piece of an old broken chisel
in the fire, and then with the help of his file, he made himself several
kinds of tools for his work. Then he takes three or four pieces of eight,
and beats them out with a hammer upon a stone, till they were very broad
and thin; then he cuts them out into the shape of birds and beasts; he made
little chains of them for bracelets and necklaces, and turned them into so
many devices of his own head, that it is hardly to be expressed.

When he had for about a fortnight exercised his head and hands at this
work, we tried the effect of his ingenuity; and, having another meeting