throw him overboard. Although in some measure I
participated in their angry feeling, yet I could not reconcile myself to
leave a fellow-creature thus to perish, even in the pit which he had dug
for others; and this too at a time when we needed every indulgence from
the Almighty for ourselves, and every assistance from His hand to
conduct us into a port.

"He deserves to die; it is all his own doings," said they; "come into
the boat yourself, sir, or we must shove off without you."

The poor captain--who after sleeping four hours had recovered his senses
and felt all the horror of his situation--wept, screamed, tore his hair,
laid hold of my coat, from which only the strength of my men could
disengage him. He clung to life with a passion of feeling which I never
saw in a criminal condemned by the law; he fell on his knees before me,
as he appealed to us all collectively and separately; he reminded us of
his wife and starving children at Baltimore, and he implored us to think
of them and of our own.

I was melted to tears, I confess; but my men heard him with the most
stoical unconcern. Two of them threw him over to the opposite side of
the deck; and before he could recover from the violence of the fall,
pushed me into the boat, and shoved off. The wretched man had by this
time crawled over to the side we had just left; and throwing himself on
his knees, again screamed out, "Oh, mercy, mercy, mercy!--For God's
sake, have mercy, if you expect any!--O God! my wife and babes!"

His prayers, I lament to say, had no effect on the exasperated seamen.
He then fell into a fit of cursing and blasphemy, evidently bereft of
his senses; and in this state he continued for some minutes, while we
lay alongside, the bowman holding on with the boat-hook only. I was
secretly determined not to leave him, although I foresaw a mutiny in the
boat in consequence. At length, I gave the order to shove off. The
unhappy captain, who, till that moment; might have entertained some
faint hope from the lurking compassion which he perceived I felt for
him, now resigned himself to despair of a more sullen and horrible
aspect. He sat himself down on one of the hen-coops, and gazed on us
with a ghastly eye. I cannot remember ever seeing a more shocking
picture of human misery.

While I looked at him, the black man, Mungo, who belonged to the ship,
sprang overboard from the boat and swam back to the wreck. Seizing a
rope which hung from the