kill him and eat him. In the pockets on one side of his coarse
convict-dress, are portions of the man’s body, on which he is regaling;
in the pockets on the other side is an untouched store of salted pork
(stolen before he left the island) for which he has no appetite. He is
taken back, and he is hanged. But I shall never see that sea-beach on
the wall or in the fire, without him, solitary monster, eating as he
prowls along, while the sea rages and rises at him.
Captain Bligh (a worse man to be entrusted with arbitrary power there
could scarcely be) is handed over the side of the Bounty, and turned
adrift on the wide ocean in an open boat, by order of Fletcher Christian,
one of his officers, at this very minute. Another flash of my fire, and
‘Thursday October Christian,’ five-and-twenty years of age, son of the
dead and gone Fletcher by a savage mother, leaps aboard His Majesty’s
ship Briton, hove-to off Pitcairn’s Island; says his simple grace before
eating, in good English; and knows that a pretty little animal on board
is called a dog, because in his childhood he had heard of such strange
creatures from his father and the other mutineers, grown grey under the
shade of the bread-fruit trees, speaking of their lost country far away.
See the Halsewell, East Indiaman outward bound, driving madly on a
January night towards the rocks near Seacombe, on the island of Purbeck!
The captain’s two dear daughters are aboard, and five other ladies. The
ship has been driving many hours, has seven feet water in her hold, and
her mainmast has been cut away. The description of her loss, familiar to
me from my early boyhood, seems to be read aloud as she rushes to her
destiny.
‘About two in the morning of Friday the sixth of January, the ship
still driving, and approaching very fast to the shore, Mr. Henry
Meriton, the second mate, went again into the cuddy, where the
captain then was. Another conversation taking place, Captain Pierce
expressed extreme anxiety for the preservation of his beloved
daughters, and earnestly asked the officer if he could devise any
method of saving them. On his answering with great concern, that he
feared it would be impossible, but that their only chance would be to
wait for morning, the captain lifted up his hands in silent and
distressful ejaculation.
‘At this dreadful moment, the ship struck, with such violence as to
dash the heads of those standing in the cuddy against the deck above
them, and the shock was accompanied by a shriek of horror that burst
at one instant from every quarter of the ship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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