saw the
boat came to the beach, and observed that nobody landed, one of them
came out of the wood, with a bow and arrows in his hand, and made signs
for the boat to come to the place where he stood. This the officer very
prudently declined, as he would then have been within bow-shot of an
ambuscade, and after waiting some time, and finding that a conference
could be procured upon no other terms, he returned back to the ship. It
was certainly in my power to have destroyed many of these unfriendly
people, by firing my great guns into the wood, but it would have
answered no good purpose: We could not afterwards have procured wood and
water here without risking the loss of our own people, and I still hoped
that refreshment might be procured upon friendly terms at the town,
which, now I was in a condition to defend myself against a sudden
assault, I resolved to visit.

The next morning, therefore, as soon as it was light, I sailed from this
place, which I called _Deceitful Bay_, with a light land-breeze, and
between ten and eleven o'clock we got off the bay or nook, at the bottom
of which our boats had discovered the town and fort. It happened however
that just at this time the weather became thick, with heavy rain, and it
began to blow hard from a quarter which made the land here a lee-shore;
this obliged me to stand off, and having no time to lose, I stood away
to the westward, that I might reach Batavia before the season was past.

I shall now give a more particular account of our navigating the sea
that washes the coasts of this island, the rather as Dampier's
description is in several particulars erroneous.

Having seen the north-east part of the island on the twenty-sixth of
October, without certainly knowing whether it was Mindanoa or Saint
John's, we got nearer to it the next day, and made what we knew to be
Saint Augustina, the south-eastermost part of the island, which rises in
little hummocks, that run down to a low point at the water's edge; it
bears N. 40 E. at the distance of two-and-twenty leagues from a little
island, which is distinguished from the other islands that lie off the
southernmost point of Mindanao by a hill or hummock, and which for that
reason I called _Hummock Island_. All this land is very high, one ridge
of mountains rising behind another, so that at a great distance it
appears not like one island but several. After our first discovery of
the island, we kept turning along the east side fro