Captain Cobb could find no reason why his voyage to Spain should be molested and he was too stiff-necked to submit without protest. His papers were stolen by the prize master and there seemed to be no means of redress whatever. He had no friends in France, official or otherwise, and his ship was tied up in the port of Brest while a starving populace looted her cargo of foodstuffs. The Reign of Terror was at its height. Chaos and bloodshed ruled in place of government. The guillotine was a law unto itself. In a period of fifteen months, 17,000 persons had been formally executed in France. The number of those who were shot, drowned, or otherwise massacred without pretense of a trial can never be known, but must be reckoned far greater. All of which may have harrowed the soul of Captain Elijah Cobb, but he kept his eye firmly fixed on his own predicament. His ship had to be released and indemnity paid him for detention and loss of cargo. After six weeks of wrangling with minor officials, he resolved to go to Paris and seek satisfaction. A stubborn mariner who shoved obstacles aside, behold him making this dangerous journey with an official courier, for armament loaded pistols and a blunderbuss, in a carriage that was “musquet shot proof” and driving like Jehu night and day, without a wink of sleep all the way from Brest, more than six hundred miles. Undismayed, persistent, Captain Elijah Cobb pursued his way through the weltering horrors of Paris, merely noting that he saw one thousand persons beheaded by “that infernal machine,” the guillotine. Thwarted at every turn, he carried his case to none other than Robespierre himself. The audacity of this Yankee seafarer was amazing. He made dollars seem heroic. His motive was really better than this--the compulsion of duty toward the owners who had entrusted him with the ship and her lading. Citizen Robespierre, Carlyle’s sea-green monster, spoke the word that swiftly untangled the affair. Shortly after this, Robespierre was overthrown and outlawed by the Convention. Trying to commit suicide with a pistol, the bullet did no more than shatter his jaw. And now for the final scene in the Place de la Concorde. Captain Cobb stood there and beheld it with his own eyes, on the 9th Thermidor (July 28, 1794). Robespierre rides on a tumbril, the mangled jaw bound in dirty linen. The Gendarmes point their swords at him to show the people who he is. A woman leaps upon the tumbril and screams: “Thy death rejoices my very heart. _Scélérat_, go down to Hell with the curses of all wives and mothers!” At the scaffold they stretch him on the ground. Then Samson, the burly executioner, lifts him aloft, wrenches off his coat, tears the dirty linen from his jaw. A hideous cry and the head of Robespierre is shorn from his shoulders.