riven to conduct prayers in the
most desperate portion of the boat voyage. His book, published at Berwick
in 1793, has now become so rare that Mr. Quaritch lately advertised for
it three times without success, and therefore no excuse is needed for
reprinting it.

The _Pandora_ was dogged by ill luck from the first. An epidemic fever
raging in England at the time of her departure, was introduced on board,
it was thought, by infected clothing. The sick bay, and indeed, the
officers' cabins, too, were crammed with stores intended for the return
voyage of the _Bounty_, and there was no accommodation for the sick.
Hamilton attributes their recovery to the use of tea and sugar, then
carried for the first time in a ship of war. He gives some interesting
information regarding the precautions taken against scurvy. They had
essence of malt and hops for brewing beer, a mill for grinding wheat, the
meal being eaten with brown sugar, and as much saurkraut as the crew
chose to eat.

The first land sighted after rounding Cape Horn, was Ducie's island;
probably the same island which, as the Encarnacion of Quiros, has dodged
about the charts of the old geographers, swelling into a continent,
contracting into an atoll, and finally coming to rest in the
neighbourhood of the Solomon Islands before vanishing for ever. The
_Pandora_ was now in the latitude of Pitcairn, which lay down wind only
three hundred miles distant. If she had but kept a westerly course, she
must have sighted it, for the island's peak is visible for many leagues,
but relentless ill fortune turned her northward, and during the ensuing
day she passed the men she was in search of scarce thirty leagues away.
One glimmer of good fortune awaited Edwards in Tahiti. The schooner built
by the mutineers was ready for sea, but not provisioned for a voyage. She
put to sea, and outsailed the _Pandora's_ boat that went in chase of her,
but her crew, dreading the inevitable starvation that faced them, put
back during the night and took to the mountains, where they were all
captured.

In the matter of "Pandora's Box," there were excuses for Edwards, who was
bitterly attacked afterwards for his inhumanity. One of the chiefs had
warned him that there was a plot between the natives and the mutineers to
cut the cable of the _Pandora_ in the night. Most of the mutineers were
connected through their women with influential chiefs, and nothing was
more likely than that such a rescue should