than I would have
confessed, to my shipmates at the gate. I found them standing together
in the moonlight, which shone clear and golden upon a gentle sea, and
gave points of fire to the rocky headlands of Ken's Island. So still it
was, such a scene of wonder and of beauty, that but for the words which
greeted me, and the dark figures peering across the water, and
something very terrible on the distant reef, I might have believed
myself keeping a lonely watch in the glory of a summer's night. That
delusion the East denied. I knew the truth even before Mister Bligh
named it.

"They've fired the ship, captain--fired the ship!" says he, with just
anger. "Aye, Heaven do to them as they've done to those poor creatures!
Did man ever hear of such a villainy--to fire a good ship in her
misfortune? It would be a sin against an honest rope to hang such a
crew as that!"

I stepped forward to the water's edge that I might see the thing more
clearly. Looming up upon that fair horizon were wreathing clouds of
smoke and crimson flames, and in the heart of it all the outline of the
ship these fiends had doomed. No picture ever painted could present
that woful scene or describe its magnificence as we saw it from the
watch-tower of the reef. It was, indeed, as though the very heavens
were on fire, while the sea all about the burning hull shone like a
pool of molten gold in which strange shapes moved and the shadows of
living things were to be seen. Now licking the quivering masts, now
blown aside in tongue-shaped jets, the lambent flame spurted from every
crack and crevice, leaped up from every port-hole of that splendid
steamer. I saw that her minutes were numbered, and I said that before
the dawn broke she would sink, a mass of embers, into the hissing
breakers.

"Good Lord, Mister Bligh!" cried I, the seaman's habit coming to me at
the dreadful spectacle, "was ever such a thing heard of? And the poor
people aboard--what of them now? What haven may they look for?"

"They've put the men ashore, sir," said Dolly Venn, hardly able to
speak for his anxiety. "I saw two boat-loads go across to the bay while
Mister Bligh was piling the ammunition. They've sent them to die on the
island. And we so helpless that we must just look on like schoolgirls.
Oh! I'd give all I've got to be over yonder with a hundred bluejackets
at my elbow. Think of it, sir! Just a hundred, and cutlasses in their
hands."

"Aye," said I, "and a tree for every rogu