aist-high to come at her, and rolling like drunken
men over her gunwale into her bottom. A volley of stones rattled about
our ears, but we were safe. Had the Chinamen carried firearms, not one
of us but must have been shot down.

I could relate a score or more of such experiences: of ugly collisions
with the police in Calcutta, of a narrow escape of being thrown
overboard by a dinghy-wallah of the river Hooghley, of a desperate
fight in the slings of the mizzen-topgallant yard with an apprentice
of my own age, and the like; but the space at my disposal obliges me
to conclude. Very little of the heroic enters the sailor's life. The
risks he runs, the adventures he encounters, have, as a rule, nothing
of the romantic in them; they are mainly brought about by his own
foolhardiness, by the proverbial carelessness that is utterly
irreconcilable with the stern obligations of vigilance, alertness, and
foresight imposed upon him by the nature of his calling, by the
imbecility of shipmates, and much too often by drink. Yet no matter
what the cause of most of the perils he meets with, his experiences, I
take it, head the march of professional dangers. Small wonder that
faith in the "sweet little cherub that sits up aloft" should still
linger in the forecastle. For certainly were it not for the bright
look-out kept over him by some sort of maritime angel, the mariner
would rank foremost as amongst the most perishable of human products.

_The Strange Adventures
of a South Seaman._

On November 4th, 1830, a number of convicts were indicted at the
Admiralty Sessions of the Old Bailey for having on the 5th of
September in the previous year piratically seized a brig called the
_Cyprus_. A South Seaman was innocently and most involuntarily, as
shall be discovered presently, involved in this tragic business, to
which he is able to add a narrative that is certainly not known to any
of the chroniclers of crime. But first as to the piratical seizure.

The _Cyprus_, a colonial brig, had been chartered to convey a number
of convicts from Hobart Town to Macquarie Harbour, on the northern
coast of Tasmania, and Norfolk Island, distant about a week's sail
from Sydney--in those days a penal settlement. There were thirty-two
felons in all. These men had been guilty of certain grave offences at
Hobart Town, and they had rendered themselves in consequence liable to
new punishment; they w