“He dressed expensively, generally wore a white hat of the best English quality, silk stockings, white trousers, and blue frock coat. His whiskers were large and bushy, and his hair was black, profuse, long, and curled. He was deeply browned with the sun, and had an air and gait expressive of his bold, enterprising, and desperate mind. Indeed, when I saw him in his cell and at his trial, although his frame was attenuated almost to a skeleton, the colour of his face a pale yellow, his eyes sunken, and his hair closely shorn, he still exhibited strong traces of what he had been, still retained his erect and fearless carriage, his quick, fiery, and malevolent eye, his hurried and concise speech, and his close and pertinent style of remark.” After he had been confronted in court with a dirk that had belonged to one of his victims, a trunk and clothes taken from another, and the pocket-book containing the handwriting of the _Morning Star’s_ ill-fated captain, and which were proved to have been found in his room; and when the maid-servant had proved that she found the dirk under his pillow, and again when he was confronted by his own black slave boy between two wax lights, the countenance of the villain appeared in its true nature, not depressed or sorrowful, but diabolically ferocious; and when Sir George Don passed the just sentence of the law upon him his face was a study of concentrated venom. The wretched man persisted up to the day of his execution in asserting his innocence; but the certainty of his doom seemed to make some impression on him, and he at last made an unreserved confession of his crimes, giving up to the keeper a razor-blade which he had secreted in his shoes for the avowed purpose of committing suicide. The narrator of his life seems to have believed that he was really penitent. On the day of his execution he walked firmly at the tail of the fatal cart, gazing alternately at the crucifix he held in his hand and at his coffin, and repeated the prayers spoken in his ears by the attendant clergyman with apparent devotion. The gallows was erected fronting the neutral ground, and he mounted the cart as firmly as he had walked, holding up his face to heaven in the beating rain, apparently calm and resigned. Finding the halter too high for his neck, he boldly stepped upon his coffin and placed his head in the noose, bidding adieu to all around him. Thus died Benito de Soto, the pirate of the nineteenth century, whose crimes had hardly been exceeded by the freebooters of any previous period. CHAPTER IX. OUR ARCTIC EXPEDITIONS.