nners
and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient
delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much
attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among
them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions.
Under these and many other attendant circumstances, equally desirable,
it is now perhaps not so much to be wondered at, though scarcely
possible to have been foreseen, that a set of sailors, most of them void
of connexions, should be led away; especially when, in addition to such
powerful inducements, they imagined it in their power to fix themselves
in the midst of plenty, on one of the finest islands in the world, where
they need hot labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are
beyond anything that can be conceived. The utmost, however, that any
commander could have supposed to have happened is, that some of the
people would have been tempted to desert. But if it should be asserted
that a commander is to guard against an act of mutiny and piracy in his
own ship, more than by the common rules of service, it is as much as to
say that he must sleep locked up, and when awake, be girded with
pistols.

'Desertions have happened, more or less, from most of the ships that
have been at the Society Islands; but it has always been in the
commander's power to make the chiefs return their people; the
knowledge, therefore, that it was unsafe to desert, perhaps first led
mine to consider with what ease so small a ship might be surprised, and
that so favourable an opportunity would never offer to them again.

'The secrecy of this mutiny is beyond all conception. Thirteen of the
party, who were with me, had always lived forward among the seamen; yet
neither they, nor the messmates of Christian, Stewart, Heywood, and
Young, had ever observed any circumstance that made them in the least
suspect what was going on. To such a close-planned act of villainy, my
mind being entirely free from any suspicion, it is not wonderful that I
fell a sacrifice. Perhaps, if there had been marines on board, a
sentinel at my cabin-door might have prevented it; for I slept with the
door always open, that the officer of the watch might have access to me
on all occasions, the possibility of such a conspiracy being ever the
farthest from my thoughts. Had their mutiny been occasioned by any
grievances, either real or imaginary, I must have discovered symptoms of
their disco