He looked at me with a mutinous eye, went to the rail and stared over the side. Tom and the council of convicts had left the poop. I peered through the skylight; the cuddy was empty, the table covered with fragments and remains of food with broken china and broken bottles and glasses, and the deck scarcely fit to walk on for the wounding stuff that strewed it. I went to the break of the poop to see what they were about on the main-deck. Both quarter-boats were alongside and a gang of convicts were stowing them. The decks were filled with the people, who, since the departure of the long-boat, had grown orderly. The mass of them conversed in knots; groups hung about the galleys. They had discovered pipes and tobacco--tobacco there would be in plenty for the guard and the crew, and possibly a stock of pipes. A number of the convicts had pipes in their mouths, and their profound enjoyment of the tobacco, after months and, perhaps, years of penitential abstinence, undoubtedly helped to keep them quiet. The sun stood something to the left of north, and the tall, motionless spaces of canvas on high cast shadows over the decks, and betwixt the rails the high noon was endurable. A thick, sickly smell of roasted paint rose from the ship’s side. If you put your hand upon the exposed wood or any piece of metal, you were burnt as though you touched hot iron. I thought to myself: If these unhappy wretches should run short of water! If this calm should hold them motionless here for days and perhaps for weeks! For calms often serve ships so in these parts, as I had heard my father and his sea friends tell. I sought to compute the number on board, and, allowing for those who were presently to leave the ship, I calculated we should muster hard upon two hundred and fifty souls. When Tom left them, what would the miserable creatures do? But, then, what was that to me? All I cared for was that Tom should come off with his life and be a free man, no longer a degraded criminal, clanking in irons, to be mangled by the cat, perhaps, at the will of any ferocious Tasmanian ruffian who might take a dislike to him. The convicts had seized the ship. One had but to look toward the now distant long-boat to appreciate the felons’ estimate of human life. I could not pity them when I thought of how they would have kept the women and children and of the havoc they had wrought below, and when I looked at their faces, recalled their songs and oaths in drink, their bestial speech, and saw the plunder on their vile backs.