The man got up, found his face bleeding plentifully, and his eye closed; but instead of resenting the insult himself, went off and complained to the captain.  Many of the Americans, either from hatred or jealousy, went along with him, and clamorously demanded that the Englishman should be punished for striking an officer.  When the story, however, came to be fairly explained, the captain said he was bound to confess that the second mate was the aggressor, inasmuch as he had acknowledged that he knew the penalty of the transgression before he committed the act; that he (the captain) had told Thompson, when he made the declaration, that he thought him perfectly right, and, consequently, he was bound to protect him by every law of hospitality as well as gratitude, after his services in saving the lives of their countrymen.

This did not satisfy the crew; they were clamorous for punishment, and a mutiny was actually headed by the second mate.  There was, however, a large party on board who were in no humour to see an Englishman treated with such indignity.  Of what country they were may readily be conjectured.  The dispute ran high; and I began to think that serious consequences might ensue, for it had continued from the serving of grog at twelve o’clock till near two; when casting my eyes over the larboard quarter, I perceived a sail, and told the captain of it; he instantly hailed the look-out-man at the mast head; but the look-out-man had been so much interested with what was going on upon deck, that he had come down into the main top to listen.

“Don’t you see that sail on the larboard quarter?” said the captain.

“Yes, Sir,” said the man.

“And why did you not report her?”

The man could make no reply to this question, for a very obvious reason.

“Come down here,” said the captain; “let him be released, Solomon; we will show you a little Yankee discipline.”

But before we proceed to the investigation of the crime, or the infliction of punishment, we must turn our eyes to the great object which rose clearer and clearer every five minutes above the horizon.  The privateer was at this time under top sails, and top-gallant-sails, jib, and foresail, running to the north-east, with a fine breeze and smooth water.

“Leftenant,” said the captain, “what do you think of her?”

“I think,” said I, “that she is an extra Indiaman, and if you mean to speak her, you had better put your head towards her under an easy sail; by which means you will be so near by sunset, that if she runs from you, you will be able, with your superior sailing, to keep sight of her all night.”

“I guess you are not far wrong in that,” said the captain.

“I guess he is directly in the face of the truth,” said the chief mate, who had just returned from the main top, where he had spent the last quarter of an hour in the most intense and absorbed attention to the cut of the stranger’s sails.  “If e’er I saw wood and canvas put together before in the shape of a ship, that there is one of John Bull’s bellowing calves of the ocean, and not less than a forty-four gunner.”