Only one other supposition has been made concerning this melancholy affair. It has been thought that the ketch grounded on the rocks, in the western entrance, and was blown up there, to prevent the enemy from getting possession of her powder. That the Intrepid may have touched the rocks is not improbable, the pass being laid down in the most accurate chart of the harbor, as less than eighty fathoms wide, with shoal water on each side, the visible rocks being more than double that distance asunder; but grounding does not infer the necessity of blowing up the ketch’s crew. To suppose that Somers would have destroyed himself through mortification, at finding his vessel on shore, is opposed to reason and probability; while it is doing gross injustice to a character of singular chivalry and generosity to believe he would have sacrificed his companions to any consideration so strictly selfish. In this case, as in all others, the simplest and most natural solution of the difficulty is the most probable. All the known facts of the case, too, help to sustain this mode of reasoning. Those who saw the ketch, think she was advancing to the lost moment, while it is agreed she had not reached, by several hundred yards, the spot to which it was the intention to carry her. By the chart alluded to, one recently made by an English officer of great merit, it is about eleven hundred yards from the western entrance to the bashaw’s castle, and about five hundred and fifty to the inner harbor, or galley mole. Here, close to windward of the enemy’s vessels, Somers intended to have left the ketch, and there is no doubt she would have drifted into their midst, when the destruction must have been fearful. God disposed of the result differently, for some wise purpose of his own, rendering the assailants the sole victims of the enterprise. It is only by considering the utter insignificance of all temporal measures, as compared with what lies beyond, that we can learn to submit to these dispensations, with a just sense of our own impotency.