104 OVER ON THE ISLAND

chiefly from the Island of Skye, and Doctor Angus MacAulay. The voyage was certainly eventful. For a while the emigrants thought that they were never going to make the New World. When they had been out only a few days, a man-of—war bore down on them in search of recruits for the navy. The captain, however, was equal to the occasion. He hoisted the flag of distress, sent all his crew below decks, and got all the old men up as assistant seamen. When the man-of—war ordered them to heave to, they did so. A cruiser was lowered, manned, and sent to find out their trouble.

“All the crew down with ship fever,” shouted the captain, ”and it has just broken out in the steerage. ”

They were asked if they needed anything. The captain believed in doing things one hundred per cent.

“Short of medicine and fruit,” he pleaded.

The cruiser supplied them with both and gladly sailed away from such a sickly crew.

The same number, about eight hundred, arrived as started out, for there were two births and two deaths en route. The Polly arrived August 7, 1803; the Dykes, August 9; and the Oughton, August 27. Selkirk had hoped that his boat would reach the Island first so that he could prepare for the coming of the multi- tude, but the Polly had a remarkably short passage and reached the Island before him. For all that Selkirk was a practical colonizer and a man of shrewd common sense, he had a wary eye for the picturesque and the beautiful. To him the settlers’ bonfires had a gipsy-like fascination. His comments, in his diary, mingles the practical with the picturesque.

I found the people scattered about along a mile of shore, a few in barns, etc., belonging to three un-