does the nature of their sufferings, suppose in the souls of those who had to triumph over the latter? and yet, what a contrast in the results!  Goffin was honored and, with justice; the men shipwrecked on the raft, once proscribed, seem to be forever forsaken.  Whence is that misfortune so perseveringly follows them?  Is it that, when power has been once unjust, has no means to efface its injustice but to persist in it, no secret to repair its wrongs, but to aggravate them?

[45] Three men saved from the raft, died in a very short time; those who crossed the desert, being too weak to go to Daccard, were in considerable numbers in this same hospital, and perished there successively.

[46] Major Peddy had fought against the French in the Antilles and in Spain; the bravery of our soldiers, and the reception given him in France at the time of our disasters, had inspired him with the greatest veneration for our countrymen, who had, on more than one occasion, shewn themselves generous towards him.

[47] The Governor, who it seems did not like the sight of the unfortunate, had, however, no reason to fear that it would too much affect his sensibility.  He had elevated himself above the misfortunes of life, at least, when they did not affect himself, to a degree of impassibility, which would have done honor to the most austere stoic and which, doubtless, indicates the head of a statesman, in which superior interests, and the thought of the public good, leave no room for vulgar interests, for mean details, for care to be bestowed on the preservation of a wretched individual.  Thus, when the death of some unhappy Frenchman was announced to him, this news no further disturbed his important meditations than to make him say to his secretary, “Write, that Mr. such a one is dead.”

The governor is, at the bottom, doubtless, a man not destitute of sensibility; for example, he never passed by the king’s picture (if any strangers were present) but he shed tears of emotion.  But his great application to business, the numerous occupations, the divers enterprises which have agitated his life, have, if we may so express it, so long distracted his thoughts that he has at length felt the necessity of concentrating them wholly in himself.

We cannot here become the historians of the governor; we do not know whether his modesty will ever permit him to publish the memoirs of his life; but the public who know, or easily may know, that having been an apothecary in Bengal, a physician in Madagascar, a dealer in small wares, and land-surveyor in Java, a shopkeeper’s clerk in the isle of France and Holland, an engineer in the camp of Batavia, commandant at Guadaloupe, chief of a bureau at Paris, he has succeeded after passing through all these channels, in obtaining the orders of St. Louis, and the Legion of Honor, the rank of colonel, and the command of a colony; the public, we say, will reasonable conclude, that the governor is, without doubt, a universal man, and that it is very natural that so superior a genius should have set himself above many little weaknesses, which would have arrested his flight, and which are proper for none but weak minds, for good people who are made to creep on upon the common route, and to crawl on the ground.