In 1799 six soldiers of the British artillery garrison at St. Helena concocted a plot to desert and stow themselves away in an American ship, the _Columbia_, which was then in harbor. Their escape was discovered soon after the Yankee crew had smuggled them on board, and they could hear the alarm sounded and could see the lanterns glimmer along the sea-wall. Afraid that the _Columbia_ would be searched, the fugitive red-coats stole a whale-boat from another ship, and the sympathetic American skipper gave them a bag of bread, a keg of water, a compass, and a quadrant. It was rather to be expected that a New England mariner who could remember Bunker Hill and Saratoga would lend a hand to any enterprise which annoyed the British army and diminished its fighting strength. The six deserters pulled out to sea in the hope of finding the island of Ascension, which lay eight hundred miles to the northwest of St. Helena. Corporal Parr had been a seaman, and he thought he knew how to shoot the sun and figure out his position; but after a week of fine weather it was his uneasy conviction that they must have run past Ascension. With a sail made of their shirts stitched together, they bore away for the coast of South America on the chance of finding Rio Janeiro. Provisions were so short that they limited themselves to one ounce of bread and two mouthfuls of water a day. After a fortnight at sea they were chewing their leather shoes, and Private John Brown, in a statement prepared after the rescue, explained how they selected one of their number to be used as food for the others. Parr, Brighouse, Conway, and myself proposed to scuttle the boat and let her go down, to put us out of our misery, but the other two objected, observing that God, who had made man, always found him something to eat. On the twenty-second day M’Kinnon proposed that it would be better to cast lots for one of us to die in order to save the rest, to which we consented. William Parr, being seized two days before with the spotted fever, was excluded. He wrote the numbers and put them into a hat, and we drew them out blindfolded and put them in our pockets. Parr then asked whose lot it was to die, none of us knowing what number we had in our pocket, and each praying to God that it might not be his lot. It was agreed that Number 5 should die, and the lots being unfolded, M’Kinnon’s was number 5. We had concluded that he, on whom the lot fell, should bleed himself to death, for which purpose we had provided ourselves with sharpened nails which were got from the boat. With one of these M’Kinnon cut himself in three places, in his foot, hand, and wrist and praying God to forgive his sins he died in about a quarter of an hour.