discovery, and the account he has written of it compares in style and colour with a log-book. In Edwards' place a more genial man, a Catoira, a Wallis, or a Cook, would have written a journal of discovery that might have taken a place in the front rank of the literature of travel. He would have investigated the murder of La Perouse's boat's crew in Tutuila on the spot; he would have rescued the survivors of that ill-fated expedition whose smoke-signals he saw on Vanikoro; he would have brought home news of the great Fiji group through which Bligh passed in the _Bounty's_ launch; he might even have discovered Fletcher Christian's colony of mutineers in Pitcairn. But, on the other hand, humanity to his prisoners might have furnished them with the means of escape, and his ardour for discovery might have led him into dangers from which no one would have survived to tell the tale. Edwards had the qualities of his defects. If he treated his prisoners harshly, he prevented them from contaminating his crew, and brought the majority of them home alive through all the perils of shipwreck and famine. In all the attacks that have been made upon him there is not a word against his character as a plain, straight-forward officer, who could lick a crew of landsmen into shape, and keep them loyal to him through the stress of shipwreck and privation. If he was callous to the sufferings of his prisoners, he was at least as indifferent to his own. If he felt no sympathy with others, he asked for none with himself. If he won no love, he compelled respect. Of his officers little need be said. Corner, the first lieutenant, was a stout seaman, who bottled up his disapproval of his captain's behaviour until the commission was out. Hayward, the second lieutenant, was a time-server. He had been a midshipman on the _Bounty_ at the time of the mutiny, and an intimate friend of young Peter Heywood who was constrained to cast in his lot with the mutineers, yet, when Heywood gave himself up on the arrival of the _Pandora_ at Tahiti, his old comrade, now risen in the world, received him with a haughty stare. Of Larkin, Passmore, and the rest, we know nothing.