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 discourage the handy mariners. John Duck happened to remember that during the first journey toward Buenos Aires eleven months before, he had thrown away his musket because the lock was broken. It occurred to one of them that the iron of the barrel might be pounded into something like a hatchet, and what did the quartet do but take a little seal meat and water and walk sixty miles to look for that musket. They found it, which was still more wonderful, and beat half the length of the barrel flat, using stones as hammer and anvil, and whetted an edge on the rough rocks.
They were about to attack the project of making a boat when a dozen horses came galloping along the beach, and there were Indians on their backs. They were as astonished as the British seamen, but had no intention of shedding blood, and promptly whisked their prisoners up behind them. At a great pace the Indian horsemen rode several miles inland to a camp where a dozen of them were rounding up wild horses. It affords a glimpse of what the life had been in that hut on the Patagonian coast to hear Isaac Morris say:
“We were treated with great humanity; they killed a horse, kindled a fire, and roasted part of it, which to us who had been eating raw flesh three months was most delicious entertainment. They also gave each of us a piece of an old blanket to cover our nakedness.”
Two hundred miles back into the mountainous interior, where white men had never been seen, the wandering party of horse-hunting Indians carried the four sailors. These were sporting savages with a taste for gambling, and it is chronicled that “in this place we were bought and sold four different times, for a pair of spurs, a brass pan, ostrich feathers and such trifles, which was the low price generally set on each of us; and sometimes we were played away at dice, so that we changed masters several times in a day.”
A few weeks later the band of nomad Indians was joined by other parties, and together, with a train of fifteen hundred horses, they moved by easy stages far inland, almost a thousand miles from the coast, and came in four months’ time to the capital, or chief town of the tribe, where the king claimed the seamen as his own property. He spoke a little Spanish, and hated the Spaniards so cordially that his friendly regard was offered these wanderers because they had served in an English man-of-war of a squadron sent against the enemy. They were slaves, it is true, but this condition was tempered with kindness, and for eight months they lived and labored among these wild horsemen of South America. When the season of spring arrived, the tribe broke camp for the long pilgrimage to the pampas and the chase of the wild horses which supplied food and raiment.
The customary route to the sea passed within a hundred miles of Buenos Aires, and the sailors persuaded their masters that it was worth while trying to obtain ransom for them. At last there was a tangible hope of extricating themselves, but it brought joy only to three of the four comrades. Poor John Duck happened to be a mulatto born in London, and his brown skin won the fancy of the Indians, who insisted that he was of their own blood. Therefore they refused to part with him and he was sold for a very high price to another chief in a region even more remote, and this was the last of him. His three shipmates were very sorrowful at leaving him, no doubt, and it must have been an incident deeply moving when they shook hands and went their opposite ways, for they had suffered manifold things together and carried it off magnificently. And in their minds there must have been the memory of that vow they had sworn together “never to quit each other unless compelled by a superior force.”
The chief was faithful to his word in sending a messenger to Buenos Aires, where the Spanish governor expressed his willingness to buy three English prisoners at the bargain price of ninety dollars for the lot.
In this manner were Midshipman Morris and Samuel Cooper and John Andrews delivered from their captivity in the wilds of Patagonia, though they were not yet to see the long road home to England. The Spanish governor of Buenos Aires behaved toward them like a very courteous gentleman, but felt it his bounden duty to labor with them for the good of their souls. “He sent for us several times,” Midshipman Morris tells us, “and earnestly urged us to turn Catholics and serve the king of Spain; to which we answered that we were Protestants and true Englishmen and hoped to die so. Many tempting offers were made to seduce us but, thank God, we resisted them all.”
This obstinacy vexed the conscientious governor, and he sent the three heretics on board of the man-of-war Asia, the flag-ship of Admiral Pizarro’s squadron, which was then lying at Montevideo. Aboard the Asia the three Englishmen were confined more than a year, with sixteen other unlucky seamen of their own race. They complained that they were treated more like galley-slaves than prisoners of war, and it was inevitable that they should try to escape. A sentry was tied and gagged one night, and the Britons swam for the shore, a quarter of a mile away. Most of them were overtaken in a boat, but Isaac Morris and one sailor, naked as the day they were born, scrambled into the jungle, and had such a piteous time of it that they were glad to surrender to the laborers of the nearest plantation. Taken back to the ship, they were thrust into the stocks, neck and heels, four hours a day for a fortnight as a hint to discourage such rash enterprise.