Johnson still resisted, but, under cover of the guns of the rest, three men dragged him forth and passed a lashing about him. Then the fight ended. In a short time the wounded were lowered into the boats and sent aboard the gunboat, while a few sailors turned to and cleared up the decks of the _Arrow_. Several men of the gunboat’s crew were killed and several more badly wounded, and these latter were brought below to where Brown and I lay. I now learned how the _Arrow_ had been retaken after desperate resistance on the part of the convicts. The commander of the man-of-war, the _Petrel_, at first accused Brown and myself of being with the convicts in everything, and produced those papers we had written and signed to prove that they spoke the truth. But those papers did more than anything we could do or say to clear us of the charge among our English friends, who were somewhat inclined at first to believe the statement of Johnson: that we only turned after being caught. Alice Waters’s statement did much to help our cause. The result was that Captain Spencer and his officers treated Brown and myself with every consideration and abstained from passing any private judgment against us before we could be tried. He told us how he had sighted the _Arrow_ about the same time we had the _Petrel_, and of his amazement when he saw us haul our wind and run up the Black Roger to our peak. He thought, of course, that the skipper of our craft was drunk and that the affair was intended as a practical joke to the gunboat. After we had gone through his lee with the American ensign flying he was afraid that he had already gone too far into the matter, and regretted his last shot, which had torn our foresail. He would have let us go, for the _Arrow’s_ name was in his register, and he had not the faintest idea of the true state of affairs on board. Having heard nothing of the _Countess of Warwick_, he had no reason to understand matters until after Brown and I had explained them. He put a prize crew on the clipper and sent her into the River Plate to be turned over to her agents at Buenos Ayres. When we reached England, Johnson made things look a little black for us at first. The villain had no scruples about perjuring himself to any extent, and he was backed by the rest of the ringleaders. But finally he and three of the latter were convicted of murder and piracy and hanged. The rest soon found themselves bound out on a voyage for the East. They never came back again. Brown and I were cleared and sent back to the States, where we arrived safe enough, Brown’s leg having entirely healed and my chest having become sound again, except for a slight shortness of breath for awhile when I exerted myself.