The prisoners, having liberty as well as the crews, not only went looking for temptation but they got together and planned to get in a lot of native canoes and carry the _Essex Junior_ by assault, when, the _Essex_ being dismantled, they hoped to capture the entire Yankee force. A traitor revealed the plot, however, and the prisoners were thereafter kept well in hand. And then came an incipient mutiny. The sailormen had enjoyed life with their friends, the Nukahivas, so much that when, in December, Porter determined to go in search of an enemy worthy of the ship, they first grumbled, and then some of them, under the lead of an Englishman named Robert White, talked of refusing to go at all. This talk reached flood-tide when on Sunday, December 9, 1813, a lot of the men from the _Essex_ visited the _Essex Junior_, when White openly boasted that the crew would refuse to get the anchor at the word from Captain Porter. But White was very much mistaken. His words were reported to Porter, who, next morning, mustered the men on the port side of the deck and then, with a drawn sword lying across the capstan before him, said: “All of you who are in favor of weighing the anchor when I give the order, pass over to the starboard side.” [Illustration: A Marquesan War-canoe. _From an engraving by Strickland of a drawing by Captain Porter._] They all passed across the deck promptly. Then he called out White, and asked him about his Sunday boasting. White denied having made the boast, but a number of the crew testified to what he had said, and at that Porter turned on the fellow and said in a burst of anger: “Run, you scoundrel, for your life.” “And away the fellow went over the starboard gangway.” So Farragut tells the story. He was picked up by one of the ever-present native canoes and carried ashore. After all it was a lucky affair for him, for the cruise of the _Essex_ was drawing to a close, and had he remained in her he would have been hanged, very likely, by his countrymen as a traitor. Having addressed the men briefly, praising their good qualities and telling them he “would blow them all to eternity before they should succeed in a conspiracy,” he ordered them to man the capstan, a fiddler began to play “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the “anchor fairly flew to the bows,” the sails were spread, and the _Essex_ and _Essex Junior_ sailed away, leaving Lieutenant John Gamble with twenty-one men, to look after the _Seringapatam_, the _Sir Andrew Hammond_, and the _Greenwich_ until Porter could return for them. CHAPTER II PORTER’S GALLANT ACTION AT VALPARAISO