I made haste the following morning to be under way after a night of
wakefulness on the weird shore. Before weighing anchor, however, I
prepared a cup of warm coffee over a smart wood fire in my great
Montevideo stove. In the same fire was cremated the Fuegian spider,
slain the day before by the little warrior from Boston, which a Scots
lady at Cape Town long after named "Bruce" upon hearing of its prowess
at Echo Mountain. The _Spray_ now reached away for Coffee Island,
which I sighted on my birthday, February 20,1896.
[Illustration: "Yammerschooner"]
There she encountered another gale, that brought her in the lee of
great Charles Island for shelter. On a bluff point on Charles were
signal-fires, and a tribe of savages, mustered here since my first
trip through the strait, manned their canoes to put off for the sloop.
It was not prudent to come to, the anchorage being within bow-shot of
the shore, which was thickly wooded; but I made signs that one canoe
might come alongside, while the sloop ranged about under sail in the
lee of the land. The others I motioned to keep off, and incidentally
laid a smart Martini-Henry rifle in sight, close at hand, on the top
of the cabin. In the canoe that came alongside, crying their
never-ending begging word "yammerschooner," were two squaws and one
Indian, the hardest specimens of humanity I had ever seen in any of my
travels. "Yammerschooner" was their plaint when they pushed off from
the shore, and "yammerschooner" it was when they got alongside.
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