Section 237. A CURIOUS STORY. V.

They had an old whale-boat⁠[1] which they had bought at St. Helena, with mast, sails, and oars, three spars for a roof, a door, and a glazed window; a wheel-barrow, two spades and a shovel, two pickaxes, a saw, a hammer, two chisels, two or three gimlets, and some nails; a kettle, a frying-pan, two sauce-pans, knives and forks, and some crockery; two blankets each, and empty covers⁠[2] which they afterwards filled with sea-birds’ down. They had a lamp, a bottle of oil, and six dozen boxes of Bryant and May’s matches.

For internal use⁠[3] they had two hundred pounds of flour, two hundred pounds of rice, one hundred pounds of biscuits, twenty pounds of coffee, ten pounds of tea, thirty pounds of sugar, three pounds of table-salt, a little pepper, eight pounds of tobacco, five bottles of gin, six bottles of Cape wine⁠[4], six bottles of vinegar, and some Epsom salts. A barrel of coarse salt was provided for curing seal-skins, and forty empty casks were intended for oil. Their arms and ammunition consisted of a short English rifle, an old German fowling-piece, two and a half pounds of powder, two hundred bullets, and four sheath-knives⁠[5]. The captain of the whaler gave them some seed potatoes, and they had a collection of the ordinary garden seeds.

When they had been four days on the island, they had a visit from a party of men from Tristan, who had come on their annual sealing excursion. They were ten days on Inaccessible, and were very friendly in their intercourse with the new comers.