On receiving the captain's orders through Mr Saunders, we immediately got our traps ready, and the boat carried us on board the brig, with eight hands to form our crew. Among them was Larry, who jumped into the boat in the place of another man, who was glad enough to escape having to go, and Jack Patchett, our coach friend, who proved himself, though a sulky, self-conceited fellow, a prime seaman. As we were short-handed we were not sorry to have him. On getting on board the brig we had first to bury the bodies of the murdered crew. Her ship's papers showed her to be the _Daisy_ of London, John Edwards, master. The pirates had rifled his pockets, and those of his mates, so that we were unable to identify them. We at once, therefore, set to work to sew the murdered men up in canvas, when, without further ceremony, they were launched overboard. We then washed down decks, to try and get rid of the dark red hue which stained them; but buckets of water failed to do that. The lieutenant and his men having assisted us in knotting and splicing the rigging, and in bracing the yards the proper way, returned on board the frigate, which directly made sail, we following in her wake. The _Daisy_ was not a fast craft, and though we made all sail we could carry, we found she was dropping astern of the frigate. "It matters very little," said Nettleship, who had brought his quadrant and Nautical Almanac; "we can find our way by ourselves." We saw the frigate's lights during the early part of the night, but before morning they had disappeared. This being no fault of ours, we did not trouble ourselves about the matter. As daylight approached the breeze fell, and became so light that we scarcely made more than a knot an hour. As soon as it was daylight, we turned to with the holy-stones to try and get the blood-stains out of the deck before they had sunk deeply in. We were thus employed till breakfast. By this time the wind had completely dropped, and it became a stark calm, such as so often occurs in the Mediterranean. The brig's head went boxing round the compass, and chips of wood thrown overboard lay floating alongside, unwilling to part company. The heat, too, was almost as great as I ever felt it in the West Indies. Still we tried to make ourselves as happy as we could. We were out of sight of the African coast, and were not likely to be attacked by Salee, Riff, or Algerine corsairs; and Tom observed that if we were, it would be a pleasing variety to our day's work, as we should to a certainty beat them off. "We must not trust too much to that," observed Nettleship. "We have only six small pop-guns, and as we muster only eleven hands, all told, we might find it a hard job to keep a crew of one hundred ruffians or more at bay."