, and then, after depriving them of such
weapons as they happened to possess, locked them up in their own cabins.
The ladies were only disturbed so far as was necessary to make them
acquainted with the fact that the ship had changed hands, and that, if
they had only the good sense to acquiesce in the arrangement, they would
be perfectly unmolested. The cook and stewards were also called, and,
having been left in ignorance of the proposed mutiny lest they should
inadvertently let the secret slip, addressed in somewhat similar terms;
whereupon they at once declared their readiness to throw in their lot
with the mutineers, and were forthwith sworn in.

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Note 1. The master of a merchant-ship is frequently spoken of by his
crew as "the old man," whether his years happen to be few or many.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

LIEUTENANT WALFORD FINDS HIMSELF IN AN EXCEEDINGLY UNPLEASANT POSITION.

On the morning following the seizure of the _Princess Royal_ by her
misguided crew, the day broke tardily, revealing to the mutineers a
wild, threatening sky, a high and increasing sea, the curling
foam-crests of which raced after the ship menacingly, and an unbroken
horizon all round. Not a solitary sail of any description was visible;
they were alone, at the mercy of the towering mountain-surges, and of
the gale which howled deafeningly past them. The sight which on that
morning presented itself from the poop of the crippled ship was one to
make the stoutest heart quail, to impress the onlooker with an
overpowering sense of his own insignificance compared with Him who holds
the ocean in the hollow of His hand, and of the blasphemous arrogance of
those who would presume to take upon themselves one of the functions of
the Almighty, and, in the blindness of their anger, attempt to mete out
to their fellow-men that justice which it is His alone to repay.

Yet no such idea presented itself to the mutineers; or, if it did, each
man was careful to conceal it from all the rest. They had been
systematically down-trodden and ill-treated from the commencement of the
voyage; their lives had been made a burden to them; and now--having at
last been provoked into the throwing off of their yoke of insupportable
bondage--they thirsted for revenge upon the authors of their miseries.

As might be expected, the whole internal economy of the ship was upset
from the moment that she fel