Donnidge rushed out, and finding the captain’s boat manned alongside, warned the crew to keep a good watch, for he believed that their commander’s life was threatened. Something of Mackshane the toady surgeon in Smollett’s _Roderick Random_ seems to hang about Mr. Donnidge. Then there is another story of an anonymous letter found in the captain’s cabin, warning him that the lieutenant and the midshipman were plotting to raise a mutiny and run away with the ship. The letter was either an impudent practical joke or another device of this remarkable naval captain’s, much on a level with the wound on his leg. The notes are but brief, and many clues were not followed up; but one ends with the conviction that the court martial came to a sound and humane decision. It told Mr. Brookes that he had plainly been too free with his tongue, but that six months’ arrest on the coast of Africa was quite punishment enough, and it dismissed the captain’s rigmarole story of conspiracy to murder and mutiny as frivolous and vexatious. The name of Captain Moses may serve as connecting link to another tale of the sea life of that time. It was told in 1704 by an army officer of the name of Colonel Luke Lillingston, in the course of a controversy with Burchett, the Secretary of the Admiralty, and historian of the naval wars of King William and Queen Anne. In 1695 an expedition left England to harass the French West Indies. The squadron was commanded by Captain Robert Wilmot, and the soldiers were under the command of Colonel Lillingston. As a military operation it was of no importance, and its character has been sufficiently described in the previous chapter. Our subject here is naval human nature as it was displayed towards the close of the seventeenth century and remained for two generations. Lillingston had served as Lieutenant-Colonel of Foulkes’s regiment in the expedition of Sir Francis Wheeler in 1692, and had, he tells us, seen instances of the “arbitrary behaviour” of naval officers. So extreme was this, and so much was it resented by military men that in 1695 they were most reluctant to subject themselves to “the ill usage and insolent behaviour of commanders at Sea, especially to officers of the army.” Lillingston moved, he assures us, by a sense of duty, agreed to go with Wilmot. A regiment was made up for him by drafts from others, and the expedition sailed at the end of January. The naval commander, who as senior captain was called commodore, carried two women with him, in defiance of the regulations, and, so the soldier asserts, was on various occasions “pleased to be very drunk.” He touched at Madeira, and on the way there had the following conversation with Lillingston. The men had not been on good terms, and we see clearly that the soldier expected the sailor to be brutal, and was on the watch for instances of “arbitrary behaviour.”