“Night came; the officer of the watch was walking the deck, and the look-outs were alone seen as they stood at their several posts. Suddenly there was a simultaneous shout came rolling up the fore-hatchway, arousing the sleepers and alarming those who were awake. The lieutenant of the watch, Mr. Douglass, ran forward on the main-deck, but was immediately driven back by the shot which the seamen were throwing about. The first-lieutenant hurried to the spot; but whilst descending the fore-ladder, he received a severe wound in the arm from the blow of a tomahawk, and seeing there was no use in going down in the dark amongst ’em, he made a grab at the man next him, and dragged the fellow on to the main-deck. But Farmer, the master’s-mate, rushed upon the lieutenant and rescued the prisoner, who joined his shipmates down below. Both lieutenants returned to the quarter-deck for arms, but the mutineers had taken care to remove the cutlasses and boarding pikes out of the way; the officers could find nothing but a handspike or two, and the first-lieutenant, with no other means of defence than his dirk, again went forward among the men. “By this time, the marines had mustered aft on the quarter-deck, and the captain, hearing the noise, ran up the companion and found the utmost confusion prevailing; the marines’ muskets and side-arms had been seized, and the sodgers crowded together without knowing what to do, for their officer was hove down sick in his cot. Captain P---- called for the first-lieutenant, and being told that he had gone forward, he immediately followed; the shot, however, drove him back for the moment, but he again advanced along the main-deck with a pistol in each hand, and three or four marines with lights. But I must tell your honour the rest in Hughes’s own words, for he witnessed the whole, and I’m thinking the horrors of that night never left his mind. Whether he took part or not in the transactions was never known, but he afterwards gave evidence agin many of the mutineers, and was the chief cause of their being hung at the fore yard-arm of the old Gladiator, at Portsmouth. I sailed with him three years, and never saw him smile; sometimes he would rave when darkness shut out every object from the sight, and the mind had nothing to rest on but the gloomy imaginings of a tortured spirit. They said he had been well edecated, and I know he was always reading at every moment he was off deck and could spare time from duty,--sometimes for hours together with the Bible in his hands, and at other times with a book he called Wolltear. He used to swear a good round stick, too, but he always spliced a bit of a prayer to the fag-end of his oaths; though occasionally he would turn ’em end-for-end, and begin with the prayer first, knotting it with a double-wall damme, which he afterwards crowned with an Amen.” He paused for a minute, and then he commenced with the following statement of The Mutiny.