ight be able to discover. "You are," the orders ran, "to keep the
mutineers as closely confined as may preclude all possibility of their
escaping, having, however, proper regard to the preservation of their
lives, that they may be brought home to undergo the punishment due to
their demerits." Edwards belonged to that useful class of public servant
that lives upon instructions. With a roving commission in an ocean
studded with undiscovered islands the possibilities of scientific
discovery were immense, but he faced them like a blinkered horse that has
his eyes fixed on the narrow track before him, and all the pleasant
byways of the road shut out. A cold, hard man, devoid of sympathy and
imagination, of every interest beyond the straitened limits of his
profession, Edwards in the eye of posterity was almost the worst man that
could have been chosen. For, with a different commander, the voyage would
have been one of the most important in the history of South Sea
discovery, and the account he has written of it compares in style and
colour with a log-book.

In Edwards' place a more genial man, a Catoira, a Wallis, or a Cook,
would have written a journal of discovery that might have taken a place
in the front rank of the literature of travel. He would have investigated
the murder of La Perouse's boat's crew in Tutuila on the spot; he would
have rescued the survivors of that ill-fated expedition whose
smoke-signals he saw on Vanikoro; he would have brought home news of the
great Fiji group through which Bligh passed in the _Bounty's_ launch; he
might even have discovered Fletcher Christian's colony of mutineers in
Pitcairn. But, on the other hand, humanity to his prisoners might have
furnished them with the means of escape, and his ardour for discovery
might have led him into dangers from which no one would have survived to
tell the tale. Edwards had the qualities of his defects. If he treated
his prisoners harshly, he prevented them from contaminating his crew, and
brought the majority of them home alive through all the perils of
shipwreck and famine. In all the attacks that have been made upon him
there is not a word against his character as a plain, straight-forward
officer, who could lick a crew of landsmen into shape, and keep them
loyal to him through the stress of shipwreck and privation. If he was
callous to the sufferings of his prisoners, he was at least as
indifferent to his own. If he felt no sympathy with others, h