ad a day, with no shelter from
the meridian and then vertical sun. Captain Edwards had tents
erected for himself and his people, and we prisoners petitioned him
for an old sail which was lying useless, part of the wreck, but he
refused it; and the only shelter we had was to bury ourselves up to
the neck in the burning sand, which scorched the skin entirely off
our bodies, for we were quite naked, and we appeared as if dipped
in large tubs of boiling water. We were nineteen days in the same
miserable situation before we landed at Coupang. I was in the ship,
in irons, hands and feet, much longer than till the position you
now see her in, the poop alone being above water (and that knee
deep), when a kind Providence assisted me to get out of irons and
escape from her.'

The treatment of these unhappy men was almost as bad at Batavia as in
the _Pandora_, being closely confined in irons in the castle, and fed on
very bad provisions; and the hardships they endured on their passage to
England, in Dutch ships, were very severe, having, as he says, slept on
nothing but hard boards on wet canvas, without any bed, for seventeen
months, always subsisting on short allowance of execrable provisions,
and without any clothes for some time, except such as the charity of two
young men in the ship supplied him with. He had during his confinement
at Batavia learned to make straw hats, and finished several with both
his hands in fetters, which he sold for half-a-crown a-piece; and with
the produce of these he procured a suit of coarse clothes, in which,
with a cheerful and light heart, notwithstanding all his sufferings, he
arrived at Portsmouth. How he preserved his health under the dreadful
sufferings he endured, and in eight months' close confinement in a hot
climate, is quite wonderful.

On the second day after the arrival of the _Gorgon_ at Spithead the
prisoners were transferred to the _Hector_, commanded by Captain (the
late Admiral Sir George) Montague, where they were treated with the
greatest humanity, and every indulgence allowed that could with
propriety be extended to men in their unhappy situation, until the
period when they were to be arraigned before the competent authority,
and put on their trials for mutiny and piracy, which did not take place
until the month of September.

In this period of anxious and awful suspense, a most interesting
correspondence was carri