On one occasion, when the Henrietta had been pushed into an unwonted position of imagined peril among the ice by her commander’s adventurous spirit, the alarm of her crew urged their disaffection into open mutiny. They gathered themselves together, and proceeded to the quarter-deck, to demand (as I have understood the incident) their being released from so perilous a situation. My Father’s disregard of their remonstrances, and expressed determination to persevere, were at length met by brute force and open violence. One of the men, excited by his companions’ clamours, and his own dastardly rage, seized a hand-spike, and aimed a desperate blow, which might have been fatal, on the head of his Captain. But, now roused to the exertion of his heretofore unimagined strength and tact, he, whilst warding the blow with his hand, disarmed the assailant, and seizing him, as I have been told, in his athletic arms, actually flung him headlong among his associates, like a quoit from the hands of the player, filling the whole party with amazement at his strength and power, and for the moment arresting, under the influence of the feeling, the unmanly pursuance of their mutinous purposes. The power of one against so many who had committed themselves to a penal act and assault, however, not being likely to continue to avail him, my Father, with a decision of purpose scarcely less surprising than his power of action, ordered a boy to take the helm, and whilst himself and others, whom his example might influence, “squared the yards,” directed the ship’s course (the wind being fair) _homeward_. Their demand to be released from the ice being thus yielded, and, with circumstances so very different from what they had expected, reduced, for a while, both the mutinous and insubordinate of the crew, to a sort of dogged quiescence. But when the ship, having cleared the ice, was still kept on the same course, and when ice and haunts of whales began to be left far astern, anxiety and alarm took place in the breasts of the authors of the mischief, who now, in their turn, felt just cause for dreading the issue of a proceeding which they had thus unexpectedly provoked. Words of unwonted calmness were now dropped by one or other of the officers, in hopes of eliciting some indication that the homeward direction was but a threat. Hints of the loss to the owners and himself were thrown out, if he followed out his apparent purpose; but all to no purpose—the Henrietta still wended her way before the home-blowing breeze with steady and unrestrained progress. At length, so great was the alarm excited, that the bold and blustering mutineers became subdued, and they came forward, backed by their subordinates in the crew, humbly soliciting that the ship might be hauled on a wind again for Greenland, and promising that themselves, and every man aboard, would submit to orders, and do their utmost to further the object on which they had embarked.