92            THE 'SHENANDOAH' PIRATE.       [CBaP. If
whaling captains before our arrival.  "Enoch," a very i. telligent and quiet native, gave us an outline of the project somewhat as follows:-" S'pose lope fixy, well-one Meliai man Plower Bay, make talky all the same San Flancisco Melican."  Perhaps quite as lucid an explanation as you could get from an agricultural labourer, or a "city Arab," at home.
We had been expecting to meet at some part of our northern voyage, the famed and dreaded 'Shenandoa.' It is an old story to return to now, but I was an eye-witne4 of the havoc wrought by her. The whole of the coast was strewed with fragments of the vessels burnt by her, and the natives had several boats and other remains of her wanton doings. She had left the Arctic and Bering Sea at the end of June of the same year (1865), but not till thirty American whaling vessels had been burnt by her. The captains and crews had been for the most part sent down to San Francisco, and I have since met a gentleman who was one of the victims. He did not complain of ill-usage from the pirate captain, but spoke much of the wholesale destruction of private property. The captain of an English whaler, the ' Robert Tawns,' of Sydney, had warned and saved some of the American vessels, and he was in consequence threatened by the ' Shenandoah.'
26th-29th September.-The weather was now getting cold and brisk, a skin of ice forming on the bay, and icicles hanging from the shrouds and ship's boats. We learnt on good authority, that the whole of Plover Bay was frozen up by the 5th October, in 1864. The smaller bay (Emma Harbour), leading out of the main one, was frozen up at the above dates.