“However, when I thought of Catherton’s villainy, it could not be denied, that black or white, Christian or heathen, human nature devoid of a regulating principle, was essentially the same, differing only in the modifications of climes; and, singular as it may seem to you, several passages of the New Testament illustrative of the same idea occurred to me at the time, and I could not help feeling that it was utterly impossible for me, even if I had been differently brought up, to deny for a moment—thinking of the wisdom of the parables—that it was truly God who had spoken on earth with the lips of man: reflecting that the thirst for vengeance for a supposed wrong had made Catherton even more wicked than Hadji himself, who would probably, under any circumstances, have disdained such a dastardly scheme of revenge as the former had partially broached, thinking to have bribed me to join him, in the situation I was in at the time, partly by offers of pecuniary advantage, and partly by his tale, which had so puzzled me at first, little dreaming that he was the man who had married Ellen. I was almost confident now that the whole diabolical story of her guilt had been one of the mate’s own planning—he, I mean, who had gone to his account—and horrible as the thing seemed, I had no doubt _now_ Parker’s notion was correct, and that the captain either in fear, remorse, or hate, or from some curious commingling of the three, had sacrificed the entire boat’s crew to get rid of his accomplice. How the body of Ellen, dreadfully emaciated as it was, came to be found in the run after the second mate’s account of her loss, was yet a mystery to me, unless Catherton, with the assistance of the steward, had palmed that story on the crew, while he secretly held her confined in the hold to starve by slow degrees. However, as I had no wish that the matter should be cleared up in the sultan’s divan, after my recent promise to the crew, I aroused myself to make the attempt to get the ship to sea. “The cove of Muscat is less than a mile in depth from its entrance at Fisher’s Rock, but how to get out of it into the current, with no wind, against the heavy swell, was the puzzle. The two forts were to be counted as nothing when the ship was once under weigh, as they merely commanded the passage, and the risk we ran from the one on the western shore was not to be thought of, if we had a chance, when it fell calm enough, to tow the ship out into the currant setting from the Persian Gulf. The land-wind was almost certain not to blow before sunset, and the Arabs were sure to board the ship from the shore before that time, although not a single craft or boat of any kind was to be seen afloat, as I swept the harbor with my glass, and I had not the least doubt but the Soliman Shah, the corvette which had anchored off Fisher’s Rock the day before, had been driven from her anchors with the frigate.