Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/338

296 John Andrews, John Duck, and Isaac Morris trudged off for the third time to look for the mouth of the River Plate and Buenos Aires.

With them trooped sixteen dogs and two pigs, and it must have been an odd caravan to behold. They carried their provender on the hoof this time. By following the sea-coast, they found pools of fresh water among the sand-dunes, where the heavy rains had not yet filtered into the ground, and a dead whale washed up on the beach served for several hearty meals. They got along without great difficulty until ten days of travel found them mired in endless swamps and bogs, which they could find no way of crossing. Again they retreated to the starting-place at the hut, but the amiable pigs were no longer in the troop. There were not so many dogs, and their number steadily dwindled; for there would have been no bill of fare without them.

Three months more the four unconquerable seamen lingered in their exile, at their wits' ends to plan a way of escape, because the exodus to Buenos Aires had been given up as hopeless. Then they discovered a large trunk of a fallen tree on the beach, and conceived the wild notion of fashioning some kind of boat of it and hoisting a sail of sealskins sewed together with sinews. They had no tools whatever, barring a pocket-knife or two, but this could not dis-