It was a time of most trying excitement for me, and I wonder to this day how it was that the _Veielland_ did not strike and founder then and there, considering, firstly, that she was virtually a derelict, and secondly, that there was no living creature on board to navigate her save myself.
I was beginning to despair of ever pulling the vessel through, when we suddenly entered a narrow strait.

I knew that I was in a waterway between two islands--Apsley Strait, dividing Melville and Bathurst Islands, as I have since learned.
The warlike and threatening natives had now been left behind long ago, and I never thought of meeting any other hostile people, when just as I had reached the narrowest part of the waterway, I was startled by the appearance of a great horde of naked blacks--giants, every one of them--on the rocks above me.
They were tremendously excited, and greeted me first of all with a shower of spears.

Fortunately, on encountering the first lot of threatening blacks, I had prepared a shelter for myself on deck by means of the hatches reared up endwise against the stanchions, and so the spears fell harmlessly around me.

Next, the natives sent a volley of boomerangs on board, but without any result.

Some of these curious weapons hit the sails and fell impotently on the deck, whilst some returned to their throwers, who were standing on the rocks about fifty yards away, near the edge of the water.