airs of
an emperor, that at once discredited him with the solid people. If he
had returned to the west coast of America, as a fur trader, he might
have wrested more honors from Russia; but his scheme to capture an
island of which he was to be king, ended in ruin for himself and his
friends.[1]

[1] It may as well be acknowledged that Mauritius Augustus, Count
Benyowsky (pronounced by himself Be-nyov-sky), is a liar without a peer
among the adventurers of early American history. If it were not that
his life was known to the famous men of his time, his entire memoirs
from 1741 to 1771 might be rejected as fiction of the yellow order; but
the comical thing is, the mendacious fellow cut a tremendous swath in
his day. The garrisons of Kamchatka trembled at his name twenty-five
years after his escapades. Ismyloff, who became a famous trader in the
Russian Fur Company, could not be induced to open his mouth about the
Pole to Cook, and actually made use of the universal fear of Benyowsky
among Russians, to keep Cook from learning Russian fur trade secrets,
when the Englishman went to Kamchatka, by representing that Cook was a
pirate, too. The _Gentleman's Magazine_ for June, 1772, contained a
letter from Canton, dated November 19, 1771, giving a full account of
the pirate's arrival there with his mutineers and women refugees. The
Bishop Le Bon of Macao writes, September 24, 1771: "Out of his
equipage, there remain no more than eight men in health. All the rest
are confined to their beds. For two months they suffered hunger and
thirst." Captain King of Cook's staff writes of Kamchatka: "We were
informed that an exiled Polish officer named Beniowski had seized upon
a galliott, lying at the entrance of the harbor, and had forced on
board a number of Russian sailors, sufficient to navigate her; that he
had put on shore a part of the crew . . . among the rest, Ismyloff."
In Paris he met and interested Benjamin Franklin. Hyacinth de
Magellan, a descendant of the great discoverer, advanced Benyowsky
money for the Madagascar filibustering expedition. So did certain
merchants of Baltimore in 1785. On leaving England, Benyowsky gave his
memoirs to Magellan, who passed their editing over to William Nicholson
of the Royal Society, by {129} whom they were given to the world in
1790. German, French, and Russian translations followed. This called
forth Russia's account of the matter, written by Ivan Ryumin, edited by
Berg