[41] These desertions are unhappily too frequent in naval history.  The St. John the Baptist stranded in 1760 on the isle of Sables, where 87 poor people were abandoned, in spite of the promises to come and fetch them, made by 320 of the shipwrecked persons, who almost all saved themselves upon the island of Madagascar.  Eighty negroes and negresses perished for want of assistance, some of hunger, some in attempting to save themselves upon rafts.  Seven negresses and a child who lived there for fifteen years, were exposed to the most terrible distresses, and were saved in 1776 by Mr. de Trommelin, commanding the Dauphine corvette.

The Favorite, commanded by Captain Moreau, fell in with the island of Adu in 1767; he sent a boat on shore with a crew of eight men, commanded by Mr. Riviere, a navy officer, but Moreau abandoned them, because the currents drove him towards the island; and he returned to the isle of France, where he took no step to induce the government to send them assistance.  The brave Riviere and all his sailors succeeded in saving themselves on the coast of Malabar, by means of a raft and his boat; he landed at Cranganor, near Calicut.

One may conceive that at the first moment the presence of danger may derange the senses, and that then people may desert their companions on board a vessel; but not to go to their assistance, when the danger is surmounted, not to hasten to fly to their relief, this is inconceivable.

[42] Persons whom we could name, divided the great flag, and cut it up into table-cloths, napkins, &c. we mention with the distinction which they deserve, Sophia, a negress belonging to the governor, and Margaret, a white servant.

[43] They dined almost every day with the English officers; but in the evening they were obliged to return to the fatal hospital, where an infinite number of victims languished:  if, by chance, one of the convalescents failed to come, their generous and benevolent hosts sent to the hospital, anxiously enquiring the cause of his absence.

[44] The affair of the coal-mine of Beaujon, as a journalist has well observed, insures lasting celebrity to the name of the brave Goffin, whose memory the French Academy has consecrated by a poetical prize; and the city of Liege, by a large historical picture which has been publicly exhibited.—­Doubtless the devotedness of Goffin was sublime; but, Goffin was only the victim of a natural accident, no sentiment of honour and duty, had plunged him voluntarily into an imminent danger, as it had many of those on the raft, and which, several of them might have avoided.  Goffin, accusing only fate and the laws of nature, to which we are subject, in every situation, had not to defend his soul against all the odious and terrible impressions of all the unchained passions of the human heart:  hatred, treachery, revenge, despair, fratricide, all the furies in short, did not hold up to him their hideous and threatening spectres; how great a difference