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I had been below all the time, and except on the evidence of Hagger, I could not prove that I had made any attempt to escape. His evidence, indeed, might not be of any value, as he had been with me, and had himself remained below.
She was under all sail, some of us thought, for the purpose of getting away. "We shall have another long chase, and if that there craft has a fast pair of heels, she'll get into Cherbourg and make us look foolish," said Dick Hagger as we watched her. We stood on, and soon had the satisfaction of discovering that we were sailing faster than the stranger.
The warrant and petty officers who were called, gave both Hagger and me good characters, and his evidence appeared to weigh greatly in my favour; still I could see that most of the members of the court-martial considered it necessary to make an example of the whole of those who had been captured, and one after the other the ringleaders were condemned to death.
The first man who appeared was his father. He told him that he had found David. "What alive?" asked Samuel. "Yes, father; but he won't be if we don't make haste; and besides him there is Bill Hagger, with a heap of coals over him."
"I shall want you to look out by and by, when I keep my watch," he said; "and meantime you, Wetherholm and Hagger, take charge of the raft, and I hope in a short time to be able to let you lie down." Saying this, Mr Harvey laid down on a small platform which we had built for the purpose of enabling two of us at a time to be free of the wash of the water.
Sergeant, examine that man's pockets," and he pointed to Iffley. The sergeant, after fumbling about, produced a piece of india-rubber. "I thought so," observed the Captain. "There has been some knavery at work. This is greatly in the man's favour." I breathed more freely at this than I had for many a day. He then turned to Dick Hagger, and told him to make his statement.
As we lay at Spithead, one day Hagger came to me and said: "Will, I don't like the look of things, there's something going to happen. The men complain that the provisions are bad, and we don't get fresh meat and vegetables from shore as we ought, and there's no leave given, and flogging goes on just as it did before, and that our present captain is as severe as the last.
I begged Captain Pakenham to listen to me, asserting as before that I had never joined the mutineers, and called upon Hagger and the others to bear witness to the truth of what I said, Hagger, stepping out from among the men drawn up on either side of the deck, declared that what I said was the truth; that we had both tried to escape from the first, but had been prevented; and that, as the officers knew, I was among the best-conducted men in the ship.
While little Dick was sleeping at his trap, and getting a cuff on the head from Bill Hagger, Samuel Kempson was sitting, pick in hand, and hewing in a chamber at the end of a main passage nearly two miles off. The Davy lamp was hung up before him, and the big corve was by his side. There he sat or kneeled, working with his pick, or filling the corve with his spade.
We had kept up so hot a fire on the first ship which had attacked us, that we had at length knocked away her main-topgallant mast and had done considerable damage to her rigging. To our great satisfaction we saw her sheer off and drop astern. "Hurrah! there's one done for," cried Dick Hagger.
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