Arauco, a fortress in Chili. In the latter
encounter Mr. Nobbs was in command of a craft which sustained a
loss in killed and wounded of 48 men out of 64, and was taken
prisoner with the survivors by the troops of the adventurous
robber General Benevideis. The 16 captives were all shot with the
exception of Lieutenant Nobbs and three English seamen; these four
saw their fellow prisoners led out from time to time, and heard
the reports of the muskets that disposed of them. Ever afterwards
he retained a vivid memory of that dreadful fusillade. Having
remained for three weeks under sentence of death, he and his
countrymen were unexpectedly exchanged for four officers attached
to Benevideis' army. Mr. Nobbs then left the Chilian service, and
in 1822 went to Naples. In his passage from that city to Messina
in a Neapolitan ship, she foundered off the Lipari Islands; and,
with the loss of everything, he reached Messina in one of the
ship's boats. In May, 1823, he returned to London in the
_Crescent_; and in the same year he sailed to Sierra Leone as
chief mate of the _Gambia_, but of 19 persons who went out in that
vessel none but the captain, Mr. Nobbs, and two men of colour
lived to return. In June, 1824, he again went to Sierra Leone,
now as commander of the same craft, and was six weeks on shore ill
of fever, but it pleased God to restore him to health in time to
return with her; and he resigned command on his reaching England.
Meanwhile the captain of a vessel in which he had once sailed had
expatiated so frequently on the happiness of the people at
Pitcairn, where he had been, that Mr. Nobbs resolved to go thither
if his life should be spared; and, with this object in view, he
set out on the 12th of November, 1825, in the _Circassian_, bound
for Calcutta, but he was detained there until August, 1827; then,
after a narrow escape from shipwreck in the Strait of Sunda, he
crossed the Pacific in a New York ship called the _Oceani_, went
to Valparaiso, and thence to Callao, where he met a Mr. Bunker,
expended L150 in refitting a launch, and made the voyage to
Pitcairn."

Bligh, in his version of the _Bounty_ mutiny, says that there was
absolutely no cause of discontent on board the ship until the mutineers
became demoralized by their long stay at Tahiti, and that he was on the
best of terms with