the least indisposition, and am still perfectly well in every respect, in mind as well as body; but without a friend, and only a shirt and pair of trousers to put on, and carry me home.  Yet with all this I have a contented mind, entirely resigned to the will of Providence, which conduct alone enables me to soar above the reach of unhappiness.’

In a subsequent letter to his sister he says,
     ’I send you two little sketches of the manner in which his Majesty’s
     ship Pandora went down on the 29th August, and of the appearance
     which we who survived made on the small sandy key within the reef,
     about ninety yards long and sixty broad, in all ninety-nine souls;
     here we remained three days, subsisting on a single wine-glass of
     wine or water, and two ounces of bread a day, with no shelter from
     the meridian and then vertical sun.  Captain Edwards had tents
     erected for himself and his people, and we prisoners petitioned him
     for an old sail which was lying useless, part of the wreck, but he
     refused it; and the only shelter we had was to bury ourselves up to
     the neck in the burning sand, which scorched the skin entirely off
     our bodies, for we were quite naked, and we appeared as if dipped
     in large tubs of boiling water.  We were nineteen days in the same
     miserable situation before we landed at Coupang.  I was in the ship,
     in irons, hands and feet, much longer than till the position you
     now see her in, the poop alone being above water (and that knee
     deep), when a kind Providence assisted me to get out of irons and
     escape from her.’

The treatment of these unhappy men was almost as bad at Batavia as in the Pandora, being closely confined in irons in the castle, and fed on very bad provisions; and the hardships they endured on their passage to England, in Dutch ships, were very severe, having, as he says, slept on nothing but hard boards on wet canvas, without any bed, for seventeen months, always subsisting on short allowance of execrable provisions, and without any clothes for some time, except such as the charity of two young men in the ship supplied him with.  He had during his confinement at Batavia learned to make straw hats, and finished several with both his hands in fetters, which he sold for half-a-crown a-piece; and with the produce of these he procured a suit of coarse clothes, in which, with a cheerful and light heart, notwithstanding all his sufferings, he arrived at Portsmouth.  How he preserved his health under the dreadful sufferings he endured, and in eight months’ close confinement in a hot climate, is quite wonderful.

On the second day after the arrival of the Gorgon at Spithead the prisoners were transferred to the Hector, commanded by Captain (the late Admiral Sir George) Montague, where they were treated with the greatest humanity, and every indulgence allowed that could with propriety be extended to men in their unhappy situation, until the period when they were to be arraigned before the competent authority, and put on their trials for mutiny and piracy, which did not take place until the month of September.