deck, some of whom must have noticed it had it continued a single minute; and the latter is proved by the only person who took notice of the circumstance, and has also deposed that, at the moment he beheld me, I was apparently in a state of absolute stupor.  The poison, therefore, carries with it its antidote; and it seems needless to make any further comment on the subject, for no man can be weak enough to suppose, that if I had been armed for the purpose of assisting in the mutiny, I should have resumed a weapon in the moment of triumph, and when the ship was so completely in the possession of the party, that (as more than one witness has emphatically expressed it) all attempts at recovering her would have been impracticable.

’The boat and ship, it is true, presented themselves to me without its once occurring that I was at liberty to choose, much less that the choice I should make would be afterwards deemed criminal; and I bitterly deplore that my extreme youth and inexperience concurred in torturing me with apprehensions, and prevented me from preferring the former; for as things have turned out, it would have saved me from the disgrace of appearing before you as I do at this day—­it would have spared the sharp conflicts of my own mind ever since, and the agonizing tears of a tender mother and my much-beloved sisters.

’Add to my youth and inexperience, that I was influenced in my conduct by the example of my messmates, Mr. Hallet and Mr. Hayward, the former of whom was very much agitated, and the latter, though he had been many years at sea, yet, when Christian ordered him into the boat, he was evidently alarmed at the perilous situation, and so much overcome by the harsh command, that he actually shed tears.

’My own apprehensions were far from being lessened at such a circumstance as this, and I fearfully beheld the preparations for the captain’s departure as the preliminaries of inevitable destruction, which, although I did not think could be more certain, yet I feared would be more speedy, by the least addition to their number.

’To show that I have no disposition to impose upon this Court, by endeavouring to paint the situation of the boat to be worse than it really was, I need only refer to the captain’s own narrative, wherein he says that she would have sunk with them on the evening of the 3rd May, had it not been for his timely caution of throwing out some of the stores, and all the clothes belonging to the people, excepting two suits for each.

’Now what clothes or stores could they have spared which in weight would have been equal to that of two men? (for if I had been in her, and the poor fellow, Norton, had not been murdered at Tofoa, she would have been encumbered with our additional weight), and if it be true that she was saved by those means, which the captain says she was, it must follow that if Norton and myself had been in her (to say nothing of