ere safe enough, and having been
taken with slaves on board, there was no doubt of her capture being
legal. We were not sorry to get rid of the little slave captain and his
crew. He kept up his character to the last, and I never met a man so
energetic and daring in doing evil. Before we left we discovered that
he was trying to induce some other slave captains and their crews to
join with him in cutting out a condemned slaver which lay in the
harbour; but it appeared that they considered the risk of the
undertaking too great to attempt it. He formed afterwards several other
similar projects, and was finally shipped off to the Havannah as too
dangerous a character to remain in the colony.

We afterwards captured a number of slavers, but none of them afforded us
so much interest and gratification as the taking of our first prize.

Story 7--Chapter 1.

CAST AWAY ON A SAND-BANK: OR, MY EXPERIENCES OF LIFE ON THE OCEAN.

Midshipman wanted for a first-class India trader! "Oh! mother, that
will just do for me!" I exclaimed. "Do let me go; I shall be back in
no time, and have all sorts of yarns to tell you." I pressed and
pressed. My mother saw that I should do little good by remaining longer
at school, or thought so at all events, and I gained my point. Within a
month I found myself on board the good ship _Betsey Blair_, of six
hundred tons, Captain Joseph Johns, master, gliding over the Atlantic at
the rate of nine knots an hour, bound out to Singapore. We had two
mates, a surgeon, two midshipmen besides myself, one of whom was making
his first voyage, and three apprentices who had never before been to
sea, with a crew, including the boatswain, of five-and-twenty hands. I
did not find things quite as pleasant as I had expected, from reading
"Tom Cringle's Log" and Captain Marryat's novels, and other romantic
tales of the sea. Captain Johns was every inch a sailor. He told us
midshipmen that he intended we should become sailors, and he began by
sending us aloft the first calm day to black down the rigging and grease
the masts. I began to go aloft with my span new uniform on. "No! no!"
he said, calling me down, "the second mate will serve you out a shirt
and trousers fit for that work." The mates laughed and the men laughed
also. I got the shirt and trousers, and spent a couple of hours aloft,
making good use of tar-brush and grease-pot, till my clothes were as
black as the rigging and as greasy as the m