Be this as it may, up this river did the adventurous Hendrick proceed, little doubting but it would turn to be the much-looked-for passage to China! The journal goes on to make mention of divers interviews between the crew and the natives in the voyage up the river; but as they would be impertinent to my history, I shall pass over them in silence, except the following dry joke, played off by the old commodore and his schoolfellow Robert Juet, which does such vast credit to their experimental philosophy that I cannot refrain from inserting it.

"Our master and his mate determined to try some of the chiefe men of the countrey whether they had any treacherie in them.

So they tooke them downe into the cabin, and gave them so much wine and acqua vitae that they were all merrie; and one of them had his wife with him, which sate so modestly, as any of our countrey women would do in a strange place.

In the end, one of them was drunke, which had been aboarde of our ship all the time that we had been there, and that was strange to them, for they could not tell how to take it."[24] Having satisfied himself by this ingenious experiment that the natives were an honest, social race of jolly roysterers, who had no objection to a drinking bout, and were very merry in their cups, the old commodore chuckled hugely to himself, and thrusting a double quid of tobacco in his cheek, directed Master Juet to have it carefully recorded, for the satisfaction of all the natural philosophers of the University of Leyden--which done, he proceeded on his voyage with great self-complacency.

After sailing, however, above a hundred miles up the river, he found the watery world around him began to grow more shallow and confined, the current more rapid and perfectly fresh--phenomena not uncommon in the ascent of rivers, but which puzzled the honest Dutchman prodigiously.