empered Yorkshireman named Oliver, lost his temper, and told the
captain that the men were starving. Angry words followed, and the mate
knocked the little man down.

Picking himself up, he went below, and reappeared with a brace of
old-fashioned Colt's revolvers, one of which--after declaring he would
"die like an Irishman"--he pointed at the mate, and calling upon him to
surrender and be put in irons, he fired towards his head. Fortunately
the bullet missed. The sympathetic crew made a rush aft, seized the
skipper, and after knocking him about rather severely, held him under
the force pump, and nearly drowned him. Only for the respect that the
crew had for his wife, I really believe they would have killed him, for
they were wrought up to a pitch of fury by his tyranny and meanness. The
boatswain carried him below, locked him up in one of the state-rooms,
and there he was kept in confinement till the barque reached Honolulu,
twenty days later, the mate acting as skipper. At Honolulu, the mate and
all the crew were tried for mutiny, but the court acquitted them all,
mainly through the testimony of the passengers.

That was my first experience of a mutiny. My brother and I enjoyed it
immensely, especially the attempted shooting of the good old mate, and
the subsequent spectacle of the evil-tempered, vindictive little skipper
being held under the force pump.

My third experience of a mutiny I take next (as it arose from a similar
cause to the first). I was a passenger on a brig bound from Samoa to the
Gilbert Islands (Equatorial Pacific). The master was a German, brutal
and overbearing to a degree, and the two mates were no better. One was
an American "tough," the other a lazy, foul-mouthed Swede. All three
men were heavy drinkers, and we were hardly out of Apia before the Swede
(second mate) broke a sailor's jaw with an iron belaying pin. The crew
were nearly all natives--steady men, and fairly good seamen. Five of
them were Gilbert Islanders, and three natives of Niue (Savage Island),
and it was one of these latter whose jaw was broken. They were an
entirely new crew and had shipped in ignorance of the character of the
captain. I had often heard of him as a brutal fellow, and the brig (the
_Alfreda_ of Hamburg) had long had an evil name. She was a labour-ship
("black-birder") and I had taken passage in her only because I was
anxious to get to the Marshall Islands as quickly as possible.

There were but five Europeans