but Mr Banks was confined to his bed. Our distress was now
very great, and the prospect before us discouraging in the highest
degree: Our danger was not such as we could surmount by any efforts of
our own; courage, skill, and diligence were all equally ineffectual, and
death was every day making advances upon us, where we could neither
resist nor fly. Malay servants were hired to attend the sick, but they
had so little sense either of duty or humanity, that they could not be
kept within call, and the patient was frequently obliged to get out of
bed to seek them.[122] On the 9th, we lost our poor Indian boy, Tayeto,
and Tupia was so much affected, that it was doubted whether he would
survive till the next day.

[Footnote 122: The Malays are not indebted to the representations of any
author who has ever been at the pains to paint their character. What
every body says, is at least likely to be true; and if so, they are a
compound of every thing that is terrific in the rudest of the species,
and of every thing that is odious in human nature, when corrupted to the
extreme. Desperadoes in courage, and gluttons in revenge, they have also
the low cunning and the treacherous plausibility with all the licentious
propensities of the most designing and profligate of mankind. Their
advancement in the arts which render life comfortable, and sometimes,
too, embellish even vice, cannot in any measure redeem them into
favourable estimation. They are in most points inferior (perhaps in
every respect, save navigation,) to all the nations that inhabit the
vast peninsula of Eastern India.--E.]

In the mean time, the bottom of the ship being examined, was found to be
in a worse condition than we apprehended: The false keel was all gone to
within twenty feet of the stern-post; the main keel was considerably
injured in many places; and a great quantity of the sheathing was torn
off, and several planks were much damaged; two of them, and the half of
a third, under the main channel near the keel, were, for the length of
six feet, so worn, that they were not above an eighth part of an inch
thick, and here the worms had made their way quite into the timbers; yet
in this condition she had sailed many hundred leagues, where navigation
is as dangerous as in any part of the world: How much misery did we
escape by being ignorant that so considerable a part of the bottom of
the vessel was thinner than the sole of a shoe, and that every life on
board de