eeling apart, I could think of no other individual in the ship with
the will and the disposition to concoct and carry out such a scheme. To
begin with, he was the only discontented person, so far as I knew, on
the ship. And his discontent was of that dangerous kind which is
dissatisfied not with any one particular thing, but with everything. He
was poor and--as I understood--practically friendless, except for an
uncle who had apprenticed him to the sea in order to get rid of him; he
was restive under discipline, his character being strongly imbued with
that false pride which chafes at a subordinate position. I had often
heard him declare that he was born to be a leader of men, and had
laughed at what seemed to me to be his inordinate conceit. He hated
work as heartily as he loved trashy, sensational literature; and he
displayed a quite childish love of dainty food and showy clothes. And
these were not his only faults: he was an unblushing liar; he scoffed at
such old-fashioned virtues as honesty and truth and godliness; he
sneered at me every time that he found me on my knees offering up my
morning and nightly petitions to my Maker; he was cruel when he had the
chance to be so; and, in short, he seemed surcharged with gall and
bitterness.

He possessed only one redeeming point, so far as I could ever discover,
and that was that he was a splendid navigator. He prided himself upon
his skill with the sextant, and often used to assert--in that cynical
way of his that might be either jest or earnest, one could never tell
which--that some day he would become a pirate king and establish himself
magnificently on some fair island of the Pacific! Heavens! thought I,
could it be possible that the fellow had actually been in earnest, and
that this mutiny was the outcome of his evil ambition? It certainly
looked very much like it.

Meanwhile, during the time that these thoughts and speculations had been
running through my head, the hands on deck had been noisily engaged in
shortening sail, and from the time that they took about the job, and the
easier, more buoyant movements of the ship, I conjectured that they had
taken in not only the royals, but also the topgallantsails, together
with, probably, the flying jib and a few of the lighter staysails.
Then, when the mutineers had done all that they deemed necessary in the
way of shortening sail, four of them came down into the forecastle, and
with the aid of a rope, the bight