eave
a tongue with power to wag in a witness-box. It nearly came to our
sharing the fate of the prisoners, but at last he said that if we wished
we might take a boat and go. We jumped at the offer, for we were already
sick of these bloodthirsty doings, and we saw that there would be worse
before it was done. We were given a suit of sailor togs each, a barrel
of water, two casks, one of junk and one of biscuits, and a compass.
Prendergast threw us over a chart, told us that we were shipwrecked
mariners whose ship had foundered in Lat. 15 degrees and Long 25 degrees
west, and then cut the painter and let us go.

"'And now I come to the most surprising part of my story, my dear son.
The seamen had hauled the fore-yard aback during the rising, but now as
we left them they brought it square again, and as there was a light wind
from the north and east the bark began to draw slowly away from us. Our
boat lay, rising and falling, upon the long, smooth rollers, and Evans
and I, who were the most educated of the party, were sitting in the
sheets working out our position and planning what coast we should make
for. It was a nice question, for the Cape de Verdes were about five
hundred miles to the north of us, and the African coast about seven
hundred to the east. On the whole, as the wind was coming round to the
north, we thought that Sierra Leone might be best, and turned our head
in that direction, the bark being at that time nearly hull down on our
starboard quarter. Suddenly as we looked at her we saw a dense black
cloud of smoke shoot up from her, which hung like a monstrous tree upon
the sky line. A few seconds later a roar like thunder burst upon our
ears, and as the smoke thinned away there was no sign left of the
_Gloria Scott_. In an instant we swept the boat's head round again and
pulled with all our strength for the place where the haze still trailing
over the water marked the scene of this catastrophe.

"'It was a long hour before we reached it, and at first we feared that
we had come too late to save any one. A splintered boat and a number of
crates and fragments of spars rising and falling on the waves showed us
where the vessel had foundered; but there was no sign of life, and we
had turned away in despair when we heard a cry for help, and saw at some
distance a piece of wreckage with a man lying stretched across it. When
we pulled him aboard the boat he proved to be a young seaman of the
name of Hudson, who was s