devoured by wild beasts. It was a great while ere the captain took any
notice of them, but when he did, he ordered the boatswain to be seized, and
threatened to bring him to the capstan for speaking for them.

Upon this severity, one of the seamen, bolder than the rest, but still with
all possible respect to the captain, besought his honour, as he called him,
that he would give leave to some more of them to go on shore, and die with
their companions, or, if possible, to assist them to resist the barbarians.
The captain, rather provoked than cowed with this, came to the barricade of
the quarter-deck, and speaking very prudently to the men (for had he spoken
roughly, two-thirds of them would have left the ship, if not all of them),
he told them, it was for their safety as well as his own that he had been
obliged to that severity; that mutiny on board a ship was the same thing as
treason in a king's palace, and he could not answer it to his owners and
employers to trust the ship and goods committed to his charge with men who
had entertained thoughts of the worst and blackest nature; that he wished
heartily that it had been anywhere else that they had been set on shore,
where they might have been in less hazard from the savages; that, if he had
designed they should be destroyed, he could as well have executed them on
board as the other two; that he wished it had been in some other part of
the world, where he might have delivered them up to the civil justice, or
might have left them among Christians; but it was better their lives were
put in hazard than his life, and the safety of the ship; and that though he
did not know that he had deserved so ill of any of them as that they should
leave the ship rather than do their duty, yet if any of them were resolved
to do so unless he would consent to take a gang of traitors on board, who,
as he had proved before them all, had conspired to murder him, he would not
hinder them, nor for the present would he resent their importunity; but, if
there was nobody left in the ship but himself, he would never consent to
take them on board.