A New Voyage Round the World by a Course Never Sailed Before

by Daniel Defoe

All this while they saw no people, nor any signals of any; except once, on the other side of the river, at a great distance, they saw about thirty together, but whether men or women, or how many of each, they could not tell, nor would they come any nearer, only stood and gazed at our people at a distance.

They were now ready to quit their camp and embark, intending to lay all their baggage on the rafts, with three or four sick men, and so the rest to march by the river side, and as many as could, to ride upon the mules; when on a sudden, all their navigation was put to a stop, and their new vessels, such as they were, suffered a wreck.

The case was thus:—They had observed a great many black clouds to hang over the tops of the mountains, and some of them even below the tops, and they did believe it rained among the hills, but, in the plain where they lay, and all about them, it was fair, and the weather fine.

But, in the night, the carpenters and their assistants, who had set up a little tent near the river side, were alarmed with a great roaring noise, as they thought, in the river, though at a distance upwards; presently after, they found the water begin to come into their tent, when, running out, they found the river was swelling over its banks, and all the low grounds on both sides of them.

To their great satisfaction, it was just break of day, so that they could see enough to make their way from the water, and the land very happily rising a little to the south of the river, they immediately fled thither. Two of them had so much presence of mind with them, as to pick up their working-tools, at least some of them, and carry off, and the water rising gradually, the other two carpenters ventured back to save the rest, but they were put to some difficulty to get back again with them; in a word, the water rose to such a height that it carried away their tent, and everything that was in it, and which was worse, their rafts (for they had almost finished four large ones) were lifted off from the place where they were framed, which was a kind of a dry dock, and dashed all to pieces, and the timber, such as it was, all carried away. The smaller brooks also swelled in proportion to the large river; so that, in a word, our men lay as it were, surrounded with water, and began to be in a terrible consternation; for, though they lay in a hard dry piece of ground, too high for the land-flood to reach them, yet, had the rains continued in the mountains, they might have lain there till they had been obliged to eat one another, and so there had been an end of our new discovery.

But the weather cleared up among the hills the next day, which heartened them up again; and as the flood rose so soon, so the current being furiously rapid, the waters ran off again as easily as they came on, and in two days the water was all gone again. But our little float was shipwrecked, as I have said, and the carpenters finding how dangerous such great unwieldy rafts would be, resolved to set to it, and build one large float with sides to it, like a punt or ferry-boat. They worked so hard at this, ten of the men always working with them to help, that in five days they had her finished; the only thing they wanted was pitch and tar, to make her upper work keep out the water, and so they made a shift to fetch a juice out of some of the wood they had cut, by help of fire, that answered the end tolerably well.

But that which made this disappointment less afflicting was, that our men hunting about the small streams where this water had come down so furiously, found that there was more gold, and the more for the late flood. This made them run straggling up the streams, and, as the captain said, he thought once they would run quite back to the mountains again.

But this was his ignorance too; for after awhile, and the nearer they came to the rising of the hills the quantity abated; for where the streams were so furious, the water washed it all away, and carried it down with it, so that by the end of five days, the men found but little, and began to come back again.

But then they discovered that, though there was less in the higher part of the rivers, there was more farther down, and they found it so well worth while, that they went looking along for gold all the way towards the lake, and left their fellows and the boat to come after.

At last, when nothing else would do, hunger called them off, and so once more all the company were got together again; and now they began to load the float, indeed it might be called a luggage-boat; however, it answered very well, and was a great relief to our men; but when they came to load it, they found it would not carry near so much as they had to put in it. Besides that, they would be all obliged to march on foot by shore, which had this particular inconvenience in it, that whenever they came to any small river or brook which ran into the other, as was very often the case, they would be forced to march up a great way to get over it, or unload the great float to make a ferry-boat of it to waft them over.