The master-at-arms was a man with a heart, as well as a ready wit, and as he scrambled over the roof of the deck-house with the sea racing at his heels, he dropped his bunch of keys through the open scuttle. The frantic prisoners heard the keys fall and knew what they meant. In semi-darkness, with the water gurgling over the floor of their pen, they strove to fit the keys to the heavy handcuffs and the chains that were locked about their legs. It is a scene that requires no more words to appeal to the emotions a hundred and thirty years after these unhappy British sailors fought their last fight for life. Ten of them succeeded in releasing themselves and were washed off into the sea, where the boats were kind enough to pick them up, but four of the mutineers were drowned with the ship, still wearing the irons from which Captain Edwards had refused to free them. It is probable that with the bunch of keys which the master-at-arms had dropped among them these four men had died while doing unto others as they would have been done by. It was almost impossible for a prisoner so heavily manacled to fit a key in the padlock that bound his own wrists together. One comrade helped another, perhaps, and so those who awaited their turn were doomed to die. And thus they redeemed the folly and the crime of that fantastic adventure in the _Bounty_. Thirty men of the _Pandora’s_ company were also drowned, but the survivors made a successful voyage of it in their open boats, across a thousand miles of the Indian Ocean, and reached the same Dutch port of Coupang where Lieutenant William Bligh had found refuge. Here they met the actors in still another thrilling drama of an open boat. A party of British convicts, including a woman and two small children, had stolen away from the penal settlement of Port Jackson on the coast of Australia in a ship’s gig, and had fled by sea all the way to Timor, living on shell-fish and seabirds and surviving ten weeks of exposure and peril. They told the Dutch governor at Coupang that they were castaways from an English ship, and he believed the tale until the people of the _Pandora_ came into port. Assuming they were survivors of the same wreck, a Dutch officer remarked to one of the convicts that the captain of their ship had reached Coupang. Caught off his guard, the fellow blurted: “Dam’ me! We have no captain.”