be attempted. His own crew,
moreover, were human. They could see for themselves the charms of a life
in Tahiti; they could hear from the prisoners the consideration in which
Englishmen were held in this delightful land. What had been possible in
the _Bounty_ was possible in the _Pandora_. Edwards regarded his
prisoners as pirates, desperate with the weight of the rope about their
necks. His orders were definite--to consider nothing but the preservation
of their lives--and he did his duty in his own way according to his
lights. And that he was not insensible to every feeling of humanity is
shown by the fact that he allowed the native wives of the mutineers daily
access to their husbands while the ship lay there. The infinitely
pathetic story of poor "Peggy," the beautiful Tahitian girl who had borne
a child to midshipman Stewart, was vouched for six years later by the
missionaries of the "Duff." She had to be separated from her husband by
force, and it was at his request that she was not again admitted to the
ship. Poor girl! it was all her life to her. A month before her
boy-husband perished in the wreck of the _Pandora_, she had died of a
broken heart, leaving her baby, the first half-caste born in Tahiti, to
be brought up by the missionaries.

"Pandora's Box" certainly needed some excuse. A round house, eleven feet
long, accessible only through a scuttle in the roof, was built upon the
quarter deck as a prison for the fourteen mutineers, who were ironed and
handcuffed. Hamilton says that the roundhouse was built partly out of
consideration for the prisoners themselves, in order to spare them the
horrors of prolonged imprisonment below in the tropics, and that although
the service regulations restricted prisoners to two-thirds allowance,
Edwards rationed them exactly like the ship's company. Morrison,
however, who seems to have belonged to that objectionable class of
seamen--the sea-lawyer--having kept a journal of grievances against Bligh
when on the _Bounty_, and preserved it even in "Pandora's Box," gives a
very different account, and Peter Heywood, a far more trustworthy
witness, declared in a letter to his mother, that they were kept "with
both hands and both legs in irons, and were obliged to eat, drink, sleep,
and obey the calls of nature, without ever being allowed to get out of
this den."

Edwards now provisioned the mutineers' little schooner, and put on board
of her a prize crew of two petty officers and s