chisel in hand. He was
rivetting a plate of copper on the hull of the _Daisy_. Already he had
nailed sheets of zinc and lead on stern and bow, and had driven cotton
wool picked from the bushes by the lake into the seams to caulk some
of the leaks. Around the boat stood crowds of Africans, their dark
faces full of astonishment at the white man mending his big canoe.

"Why should a man toil so terribly hard?" they wondered.

The tribesmen of the lake had only canoes hollowed out from a
tree-trunk, or made of some planks sewn together with fibres from the
banana tree.

At last Mackay had his boat ready to sail up the Victoria Nyanza.
The whole of the length of that great sea, itself larger than his own
native Scotland, still separated Mackay from the land of Uganda for
which he had left Britain over fifteen months earlier.

All through his disappointments and difficulties Mackay fought on.
With him, as with Livingstone, nothing had power to break his spirit
or quench his burning determination to carry on his God-given plan to
serve Africa.

Every use of saw and hammer and chisel, every

"trick of the tool's true trade,"

all the training in the shipbuilding yards and engineering shops at
Edinburgh and in Germany helped Mackay to invent some new, daring and
ingenious way out of every fresh difficulty.

_The Wreck of the "Daisy"_

Now at last the _Daisy_ was on the water again; and Mackay and his
bearers went aboard[53] and hoisting sail from Kagei ran northward.
Before they had gone far black storm clouds swept across the sky.
Night fell. Lightning blazed unceasingly and flung up into silhouette
the wild outlines of the mountains to the east. The roar of the
thunder echoed above the wail of the wind and the threshing of the
waves.

All through the dark, Mackay and those of his men who could handle an
oar rowed unceasingly. Again and again he threw out his twenty-fathom
line, but in vain. He made out a dim line of precipitous cliffs, yet
the water seemed fathomless--the only map in existence was a rough
one that Stanley had made. At last the lead touched bottom at fourteen
fathoms. In the dim light of dawn they rowed and sailed toward a shady
beach before the cliffs, and anchored in three and a half fathoms of
water.

The storm passed; but the waves from the open sea came roaring in and
broke over the _Daisy_. The bowsprit dipped under the anchor chain,
and the whole bulwark on the weatherside was carried