ower and authority, thereby averting--as I soon had reason to
believe--many a serious dispute and quarrel between the widely
conflicting elements that were confined so closely together in the ship.

The terms upon which I was to command the _Mercury_ having at length
been arranged upon as satisfactory a basis as I could reasonably expect,
I now found time to give consideration to my plans for the future. As
my hope that the wild scheme of the conspirators might be frustrated,
and the ship and her cargo restored to their lawful owners, rested
almost entirely upon the possibility that we might fall in with a
British man-o'-war, the first question to which I devoted my attention
was that of the route which I should choose by which to reach the
Pacific. There were two alternative routes open to me; one--and that,
perhaps, rather the safer of the two from the navigator's point of
view--to the south and east of Australia, then northward between the
Solomon and Admiralty groups to the waters wherein our search for a sort
of earthly Paradise was to be prosecuted; and the rather shorter but
more dangerous route up the western coast of Australia, then through the
Ombay Passage into the Banda Sea, and thence, through the Boeroe Strait,
into the Molucca or the Gillolo Passage, the successful negotiation of
either of which would bring us to the spot where our search was to
commence. If the question of ease and safety of navigation had alone
been concerned, I should have unhesitatingly chosen the former; but when
I came to weigh the comparative chances of falling in with a British
man-o'-war, it did not take me long to make up my mind that the closer I
could hug the Philippines, and the longer I could remain in their
neighbourhood, the more likely should I be to encounter something
belonging to the China station, and I accordingly settled upon the
second alternative. This choice had the further advantage that, being
the shorter of the two routes, it gratified all hands, none of whom was
intelligent enough to understand and appreciate the question of the
comparative dangers of the two routes, or to consider that, by adopting
the one which met with their approval, the risk of encountering a man-
o'-war--and thus having all their plans knocked on the head--was very
greatly increased. Naturally, I did not enlighten them.

It was the season of the north-east monsoon in the Indian Ocean, and a
careful study of the chart and directory