fall on him of a boy from aloft. But one of the crew, who was allowed to be evidence for the King, gives testimony that the mutiny had been brewing for days. This man said that one of the midshipmen, Wiltshire, avowed that he knew it was coming, and had expected it to occur on the night before it actually broke out.

The Hermione was cruising in the Mona Passage, to the westward of Porto Rico, in company with the brig Diligence. The two vessels were chasing a French privateer at sundown, and in the haze of the evening Captain Mends of the Diligence lost sight of the Hermione. He did not see her again nor hear of her till the 20th September, when when he captured a Spanish schooner from La Guayra, near Altabela. From the Spanish skipper he heard a story which, in the words of his deeply-agitated despatch to the Admiral, "mocks our warmest passions, and remained for these times to produce." The skipper improved the truth, which needed no additions. He assured Mends that not only had the "Hermiones" seized the ship and taken her into La Guayra, but that, as the English officer words it, they had added to the crime of mutiny "the last, the most horrible of all human actions, a general indiscriminate slaughter of their captain and officers excepting the surgeon and one of the master's mates who concealed themselves; most of the marines, six women, and in all about

forty-six souls." The style of Captain Mends is not free from ambiguity, but he clearly meant that the marines and the women had been massacred. This, however, was a mistake, or a fiction, of the Spanish skipper's. It does not appear that Mends saw any reason to doubt that there were women on board the Hermione. The Spaniard also told him that a mutiny had been planned in the Diligence, and warned him to stand on his guard. He took the bold and sane course of calling his men aft, and repeating the Spaniard's story to them. He assures the Admiral that they expressed the most vehement horror of the crime committed on the Hermione, and professed their readiness to attack her in spite of her superior force, and either retake her or sink by her side. Let us hope they meant what they said, but they could not well say anything else, and we may suspect that the loudest protests came from men who had actually been in correspondence with the mutineers.

The story, as it came out in the long series of courts-martial on the Hermione's men, which went on for years, did not need the additions of the Spanish captain. Some of the mutineers were taken serving in French privateers. Some who had been carried away in the general outbreak came in and volunteered evidence. Some slipped back to England hoping to escape notice. actually recognised and arrested in the entrance

One was

to

Portsmouth dockyard-an extreme example of the recklessness of the sailor. We can piece the tale together from testimony and confession.

The master, Mr Southgate, tells how he was lying in his cabin wounded when he heard a great noise of trampling and shouting between - decks. He doubtless knew well enough what had happened. Unable to remain idle, he went out to learn at least to seek means of safety-and was run into by the terrified sentry, M'Neill, who had been been felled and disarmed by the mutineers at the captain's cabin-door, and spared by them as harmless. M'Neill rose and rushed on deck to warn the officer of the watch. the second lieutenant, Foreshore. Foreshore had heard the clamour from below, and ordered a master's mate who was in his watch -Turner-to go down and see what was happening. He was insolently told to go and see for himself, for Turner was one of the leaders of the mutiny. The officer must have seen how helpless he was. called on the man at the wheel to wear the ship and steer for the Diligence. The only hope of support was in the consort vessel. The sailor refused with an oath, and Foreshore struck him down, Before he could himself take the helm he was overpowered and hurled overboard. M'Neill, who came too late to be of use on the quarterdeck, returned to the cabin, and in his evidence tells how he saw Pigot at bay, with his back to

He

one of the larboard guns, his nightshirt all torn, and his body streaming with blood. He heard him call for his barge's crew, and the coxwain-the most ruthless of the mutineers-answer, “Youwe are all here." Pigot, pleading, threatening, cursing, hitting out, was beaten down with tomahawks and hurled overboard. It was said that he clung to the rail of the cabin-window till his fingers were chopped through. Many stories were told for in such cases men take to telling tales in rivalry. There is a naval tradition that the boatswain was hacked to death by the ship's boys with dumbscrapers, but there is good evidence that he was thrown overboard alive. Mr Foreshore was able to clamber in through a port, and he stood, with blood on his face, clasping his hands together, and saying, "Good God! what have I done to you?" His offence - his now unpardonable offence-was that he represented the authority they had offended inexpiably. He was hurled overboard. When Pigot fell into the water his murderers shouted in brutal glee, "Hughie is overboard, and the ship's our own.' Then they shouted, "Hand them up, hand them up." Lieutenant Reid was thrown over, begging hard for his life and calling on the men to remember his wife and children. It was not a well-chosen appeal to make to pressed men whose wives and children were little thought of by those who

bands to be imprisoned for years together in ships where no leave was allowed. Against Lieutenant Douglas the men showed peculiar malignity, dragging him up feet first and crowding together to get a last blow at him. The lieutenant of marines, Mackintosh, was hurled overboard by one of his own soldiers, who bore the nickname of Happy Tom. The captain's clerk was thrown into the sea by a sailor whose name (I regret to say) was Andrew Hannah. The victims were in all the captain, the three lieutenants, the lieutenant of marines, boatswain, captain's clerk, surgeon, and purser.

Touches of farce are as usual not absent from the drama. When the more self-possessed of the men had got the ship under control and had headed

while the more foolish were drinking the captain's wine, the ringleaders proceeded to restore order. One of their first steps was to call for the captain's steward and inform him that his duty would be "to wait upon the gentlemen in the cabin"-that is to say, themselves. When the Hermione reached La Guayra five days after the mutiny, the steward was told to bring his razor and shave the gentlemen, also to dress their hair-with powder, of course, and in the fashionable club, so that they might present themselves to the Spanish Governor in a becoming state. They went on their mission, sitting in the sternsheets " "like officers," to all appearance well satisfied with themselves.

DAVID HANNAY.

2 L

VOL. CLXXXVII.-NO. MCXXXIV.

A CYNICAL friend asks me what the heavy side of my official life was like, if my recent pages represent its represent its lighter side. Well, I suppose I am like the old lady's parrot that did So much thinking that it lapsed into seriousness at times. But I must try to mend my ways. And yet I do not wish to convey the very false impression that amusement is the prevailing element in Police work. Both my preBoth my predecessors in office suffered from the strain, and retired after five years of it. And if I was able to bear it for thirteen years, and to be "fitter on leaving Scotland Yard than when I entered on the duties of the office, this was due mainly to a native sense of humour and an acquired capacity for turning away from anxious and engrossing work. To be able to find amusement in events of grave import is a useful relief to the mind; but to have interests that are infinitely higher and more absorbing than sublunary matters of any kind—this, to put it on the lowest ground, is a mental tonic of inestimable value.

When the ordinary civil servant leaves his office in the afternoon, he has a complete respite from Government work

for some seventeen hours; and when Saturday comes round, his recess extends to more than forty hours. But Police work in London knows no such leisure. such leisure. And of the two main branches of Police duty, Public Order and Crime, the latter is, of course, the more exacting. In a very real sense, indeed, the head of the C.I.D. is never off duty. Every crime committed in this seven-million peopled "province of brick" is reported to him; and all cases of special urgency or importance are reported immediately, day or night. And our methods were antiquated. When I first came to London, intercommunication between the various Government offices was conducted on the same system as in the days of Queen Anne. The telephone was a dream of the future, and none of the offices were connected by telegraph. Before I moved from the Irish Office to Whitehall I had two messengers in attendance on me to carry letters and papers to and from the Home Office. This was in 1868. Soon after I went to Scotland Yard, twenty years later, the police offices became connected with Whitehall by telephone, and when we moved to the Embankment it was

brought into use within the new building. But the houses of the Commissioners were dependent on the telegraph, and we had not yet attained even to self-recording instruments. Every message therefore had to be spelled out letter by letter. The telegraph, though of course a necessity, was thus a thorough nuisance; and for some occult reason I had more calls during my first year of office than at any subsequent period.

And the "red tape" element in Government work is exasperating to any one who has a soul above trivialities. If one of my officers took a bus to Oxford Circus or the City, he could not recover the fare without a certificate under my hand. Matters of vastly greater importance were left to the discretion of a Superintendent; and a minute bearing my initials was sufficient authority for the arrest of a burglar or a murderer.

But

here I had to give my signature in full on three separate forms, certifying that the charge was legitimate and the amount correct. How my predecessors tolerated such a system is a mystery to me; but before many weeks passed I "went on strike" respecting this and similar imbecilities. I directed the Superintendents to deal with all such matters, and I announced that I would add my initials to one form, and only to one, in each case, and this without examination of the details. Sir Charles Warren was indignant. For he had to sign all the forms

in full. "Yes," I said, "and that is further proof of the absurdity of the system, for the Treasury requires your certificate as Chief Commissioner, but mine is only for the Receiver." That settled the matter, for not only was Sir Charles eminently sensible, but he delighted in thwarting the Receiver ! This matter

may seem too trifling for notice here, but my object is to let the public see behind the screen of a Government office, so far as it is in the public interest to do so. The Radical-Socialist believes that if the country were administered by Government offices the millennium would follow: I confidently predict that the resulting millennium would not last thousand years!

Though a well-oiled wheel does not suffer by being kept turning, a little grit will impair its usefulness. And with a hale man it is not work, but worry, that kills. The work told on Howard Vincent. And yet I often looked back with envy to his days at Scotland Yard. Scores of times have I been in the Under Secretary's room at the Home Office when he came in to talk about some case of special interest or difficulty. But instead of Liddell, I had to do with Lushington. Now Liddell, though he never played tennis with me, or dined at my table, would always have been ready to give sympathetic advice and help; but Lushington was a man of a different kidney. By instinct and training he was a doctrinaire Radical, and that means a good deal.