A few days before this, one Dubreuil had attempted to escape, but had been suffocated in the mud-bank. On the morning after the interview above described, the bugle sounded for all the prisoners to be paraded on the upper deck. Here they found the captain and officers, all in full uniform, the guard drawn up with fixed bayonets, and on the deck in front of them a long object covered with a black cloth. The cloth was removed, and the wasted body of Dubreuil, with his eyes picked out, was exposed. Souville was called forward. ‘Do you recognize the body?’ asked the captain. ‘Yes,’ replied Tom, ‘but it does not matter much. He was a bad fellow who struck his mother.’ The horrible exhibition had been intended as a deterrent lesson to the prisoners in general and to Souville in particular, especially as it was known that he and Dubreuil had been lifelong acquaintances in Calais, but, as far as Tom was concerned, his reply sufficiently proved that it was thrown away on him, whilst among the other prisoners it excited only disgust and indignation. Tom Souville’s escape was arranged for that same night. It was quite favourable for his enterprise, dark and so stormy that the hulk rolled heavily. Tilmont made Tom take a good drink of sugar, rum, and coffee; the two men greased themselves all over thoroughly; round Tom’s neck was an eelskin full of guineas, in his hat a map of the Channel, in a ‘boussole’ tinder and steel, a knife in the cord of his hat, and a change of clothes in a little leather bag on his back. Overboard he slipped (Tilmont’s name is not again mentioned, although he greased himself, so I presume he did not start. There are many instances of poor fellows, after much elaborate preparation, being deterred at the last moment by the darkness, the black depths below, the long swim, and the extreme uncertainty of the result). It was a hard, long struggle in the wild night, and throughout appeared the face of Dubreuil with its empty orbits before the swimmer. However, in two hours and a half he reached land. He rested for a while, cleaned the mud off, changed his clothes and started to walk.