On the third day of our blockade we were destined to a fresh and more painful experience than we had yet encountered. One of the men who had been very slightly wounded with an arrow on the fore arm came to Hatibu and complained that he felt shooting pains in his arm. We did all we could by bathing it with cold water; but his pains increased, and soon he fell into most frightful convulsions. He begged for water, being consumed by thirst, but was utterly unable to swallow owing to the convulsive action of his throat, and soon his jaw became locked. He now endured the most frightful agony, his body becoming at times as rigid as a bar of steel, while pieces of wood which he gripped in his hands were crumbled into splinters. Sometimes the action of his muscles was so powerful as to bend him like a bow backwards, and then there were spasmodic relaxations and twitchings which seemed to tear him in pieces.
For four or five hours he endured this agony, and before he died three more of our wounded men were seized in the same manner. We could do nothing whatever to relieve them, but could only remain passive spectators of their horrible and intense agony. All four had been wounded with arrows; and five others, who had also received arrow wounds, became so powerfully affected by seeing the sufferings of their fellows, that they too fell victims to the fell demon of lockjaw. I cannot describe a tithe of the extraordinary things they suffered, and if I did I do not think that I should be believed; but one of them in his agony seized a hardwood spear-shaft in his teeth and bedded them so deeply that after death it could not be taken out of his mouth.
Curiously enough the remainder of the wounded men, whose wounds being from spears were much larger and apparently more serious than those from the arrows, did not suffer from lockjaw, and all their wounds healed up kindly. The sufferers themselves ascribed their torments to the arrows being poisoned; but I afterwards found that it was not the case that our enemies used poisoned arrows in war, but reserved them for hunting. Their fighting arrows were tipped with pieces of excessively hard wood made as sharp as needles; and I believe that the truth is, that a punctured wound is likely to cause lockjaw, while a cut or a gash will not.