About mid passage, it blowing fresh, with the ship under double-reefed topsails, I was at the weather, with one of the Canadians at the lee, wheel. Mallet was at work in the larboard, or weather, mizen chains, ready to lend me a hand. At this moment the Pictou came up under our lee, to speak us in relation to carrying a light during the night. Her masts swung so she could not carry one herself, and her commander wished us to carry our top-light, he keeping near it, instead of our keeping near him. The schooner came very close to us, it blowing heavily, and Mallet called out, "Ned, now is your time. Up helm and into him. A couple of seas will send him down." This was said loud enough to be heard, though all on deck were attending to the schooner; and, as for the Canadian, he did not understand English. I managed to get the helm hard up, and Mallet jumped inboard. The ship fell off fast; but the lieutenant, who was on board as an agent, was standing in the companion-way with his wife, and, the instant he saw what I had done, he ran aft, struck me a sharp blow, and put the helm hard down with his own hands. This saved the Pictou, though there was a great outcry on board her. The lieutenant's wife screamed, and there was a pretty uproar for a minute, in every direction. As the Regulus luffed-to, her jib-boom-end just cleared the Pictou's forward rigging, and a man might almost have jumped from the ship to the schooner, as we got alongside of each other. Another minute, and we should have travelled over His Majesty's schooner, like a rail-road car going over a squash. The lieutenant now denounced us, and we prisoners were all put in irons. I am merely relating facts. How far we were right, I leave others to decide; but it must be remembered that Jack had, in that day, a mortal enmity to a British man-of-war, which was a little too apt to lay hands on all that she fell in with, on the high seas. Perhaps severe moralists might say that we had entered into a bargain with the captain of the Regulus, not to make war on him during the passage; in answer to which, we can reply that we were not attacking _him_, but the Pictou. Our intention, it must be confessed, however, was to seize the Regulus in the confusion. Had we been better treated as prisoners, our tempers might not have been so savage. But we got no good treatment, except for our own work; and, being hedged in in this manner, common sailors reason very much as they feel. We were not permitted to go at large again, in the Regulus, in which the English were very right, as Jack Mallet, in particular, was a man to put his shipmates up to almost any enterprise.