they had taken very much, if any, of the ship's
cargo. But we could not find any weapons or ammunition of any kind; if,
therefore, the ship had carried anything of the sort the pirates had
cleared the whole of it out of her. After giving the craft a pretty
thorough overhaul fore and aft, and making a number of notes of my most
important discoveries, I eventually came to the conclusion that the
vessel had been surprised and laid aboard during the night; that her
crew had been mustered and secured, most likely with a guard over them;
and that, after the pirates had taken all that they cared for out of the
ship, they had brutally murdered all hands.

It now became a nice question with me what--if anything--I ought to do
with this blood-stained derelict. Although she had lost her mizenmast,
there was nothing to prevent her being navigated to a port; and had the
circumstances been different, I should have called for volunteers and
made an effort to induce a crew to undertake the navigation of her to,
say, Batavia, with the idea of claiming salvage. But I had come to know
by this time that no eloquence of mine, even though it were backed up by
the prospect of a handsome sum of salvage money, would be powerful
enough to wean the crew of the _Mercury_ from their cherished idea of a
life of ease and independence upon some fair tropic island, to say
nothing of their fear of what would follow upon the discovery of their
unlawful appropriation of the ship and cargo to their own use and
service. I therefore very quickly, yet none the less unwillingly,
abandoned that idea, and proceeded to consider the merits of the only
alternatives left me, namely, those of destroying her, and of leaving
her just as we had found her--excepting, of course, that in the latter
case sentiment demanded the decent and reverential burial of her
murdered crew. Considering the latter alternative first, if we left her
drifting about the ocean, what was likely to happen? On the one hand
she might be fallen in with by another ship and taken into a port; but
on the other hand it was equally likely that she might become a death-
trap to some other craft, athwart whose hawse she might drift on some
black and stormy night, and whose bows would be stove in and destroyed
by violent collision with her; or she might be swamped and founder in
the next gale that she encountered. Taking all things into
consideration, I at length came to the conclusion that the be