ing a more depraved character in the criminal than
crimes of a similar description committed on the land. At sea there are
no constables or police officers, no magistrates or good citizens ready
and willing to aid in preserving the peace of society, protecting life
and property when endangered, and in arresting a rogue or murderer. For
this reason laws relating to mutiny, piracy, and murder on the seas are
punishable with death. In many atrocious cases it is difficult, perhaps
impossible, to obtain proof sufficient to convict the offender; but
whenever a violator of those laws, whether a principal or accessory, is
arrested, tried, and convicted, THE PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE SURE TO
FOLLOW. The certainty of punishment is a mighty preventive to crime.
The impulses of that false philanthropy which seems to flourish in the
present age, can never be more injuriously indulged than by persevering
and unscrupulous efforts to influence the press and rouse public
opinion in favor of setting aside the verdict of a jury, and snatching a
red-handed murderer on the high seas from the gallows.

Nothing particularly remarkable occurred during our passage home. It
was in the season of the year when severe gales are met with on the
Atlantic, but the brig Joseph proved a good sea boat, tight as a drum,
and could lie to or scud without danger of being overwhelmed by the
combing waves. On this passage a little incident occurred off the Orkney
Islands, that will convey some idea of the dangers to which those are
subjected whose home is on the ocean.

We were lying to in a gale. The wind blew fiercely in flaws, and there
was a high and turbulent sea running. The brig was at times uneasy,
and in the pauses of the gale rolled heavily to windward as well as to
leeward. Orders were given to send down the fore-top-gallant mast.
I hastened with alacrity aloft for that purpose, and had reached the
cross-trees, when in a lull of the tempest, the brig, lying in the
trough of the sea, lurched fearfully to windward. I grasped firmly one
of the top-gallant shrouds above the cross-trees, but the rope being old
and decayed, parted in the horn of the cross-trees BENEATH MY HANDS.

I clung, with a desperate grasp, to the rope, but was thrown out with
a jerk in an angle of forty-five degrees with the horizon, and when
the brig suddenly righted I attained for a few seconds a horizontal
position, and to an observer on deck must have looked not unlike a
spread eag