While cruising off Pernambuco we boarded a Portuguese vessel bound to Africa, so evidently fitted out for the purpose of slave trade that my captain took possession of her, and sent me to convey her to the Cape of Good Hope for adjudication.  It was the usual thing to send the captain of a vessel so captured as a prisoner on board his ship, so that he might be interrogated at the trial.  In this case the master and three of his crew were sent.  The prize crew consisted of myself and six men.  Now the captain was an exceedingly gentlemanlike man, a good sailor, and a first-rate navigator.

At first I treated him as a prisoner, but by degrees he insinuated himself into my good graces to such an extent that after a while I invited him to mess with me, in fact, made a friend of him, little thinking of the serpent I was nourishing.

For several days all went well.  I was as unsuspicious as a child of foul play.  We lived together and worked our daily navigation together, played at cards together, in fact were quite chums.  The three men who were supposed to be prisoners were allowed considerable liberty, and as they had, as I found out afterwards, a private stock of grog stowed away somewhere, which they occasionally produced and gave to my men, they managed to be pretty free to do as they wished.  For all that, I ordered that the three prisoners should be confined below during the night.

As the weather was very hot I always slept in a little place on deck called a bunk, a thing more like a dog-kennel than aught else I can compare it to, excepting that the hole for entrance and exit was somewhat larger than that generally used for the canine species.

I always slept with a pistol (revolvers were unknown in those days) under my pillow.  Luckily for me that I did so, as the result will show.

I had remarked (this I thought of afterwards) that the prisoner captain and some of his men had been whispering together a good deal lately; but not being in the slightest degree suspicious I thought nothing of it.

One evening I retired to my sleeping place as usual, after having passed a pleasant chatty evening with my prisoner.  I was settling myself to sleep, in fact I think I was asleep as far as it would be called so, for I had from habit the custom of sleeping with one eye open, when I saw or felt the flash of a knife over my head.  The entrance to my couch was very limited, so that my would-be murderer had some difficulty in striking the fatal blow.  Instinct at once showed me my danger.

To draw my pistol from under my pillow was the work of a second; to fire it into the body of the man who was trying to stab me, that of another.  A groan and a heavy fall on the deck told me what had happened, and springing out of my sleeping berth I found my ci-devant friend the captain lying on his face, dead as a door nail.  In the meantime I heard a row in the fore-part of the ship.  On going forward