At the same time I must confess that I was a good deal astonished at many of the opinions given out from the witness box. These opinions—while strictly upholding the truth of the old adage, “Many men, many minds”—were no doubt well meant, and even if some of them were a little ridiculous, I daresay the various witnesses spoke “according to their lights.” If not considered audacity on my part, I would like to draw attention to a number of these “notions.” For instance, one witness on being asked how he would have blocked the pantry window during the time the water was pouring through it, replied that he would have got “a hammer and chisel and cut a few holes in the iron bulks-head, through which, by means of bolts, he would have fastened an iron plate, making all secure in half an hour.” To have done a job like that when the ship was lying alongside the wharf would have been, in my estimation, a very smart half hour’s work, but to do it when the ship was wallowing in the sea, now rolling to windward, and now on her beam ends, and the decks full of raging water, was simply an utter impossibility. Admitting, which _I_ do not, that the plate could have been put on in half an hour, the ship would have been down before the job was finished! _Ergo._ It is much easier to do a perilous job in a witness box than have nerve enough to do it on a sinking ship! Another witness for the defendants said he would have fastened a piece of canvas over the window; while a third, fourth, and fifth stated they would have stopped the water from getting in by means of “a cushion” “a pillow,” or “a bit of anything.” Just so; and this is how these men of imaginary fertile resources throw slush on the memory of Captain Mathieson—as able and tried a seaman as ever walked a plank—as if he, and those with him, had not done all that men could do under the circumstances. Again, two of the defendants’ witnesses—neither of them a sailor by the way—were of opinion that “by the wind getting underneath the wooden awning when the ship was lying over, it would have a lifting tendency, and, like a sail, would buoy the vessel up.” For the benefit of landsmen, or of those whose knowledge of nautical affairs is only superficial, I may here state that if a main trysail had been set on the ship, it would have had a lifting tendency, because the wind, after striking flatly against the sail, must escape somewhere, and there being considerably more room for escape at the upper part of the sail than at the lower, the wind consequently goes upward, _i. e._ Above the gaff the wind has boundless space to fly to; while beneath the boom the exit space is confined to the small area between the boom and the ship’s deck. Anyone who has ever been half way out on a ship’s gaff—as I have been many a time—when a trysail was set could not fail to feel the wind blowing him up from below, and pretty strongly too. On the other hand, a ship lying over with a big wooden awning on her poop, the