ing, to see if we could get on shore safely, and I saw then that we were sold; but it was impossible to recede: signals had doubtlessly been made, and, on the least movement, the guns of the fort could blow us out of water. It was compulsory then that we should await the event. Soon a boat, with twenty men on board, left the shore and approached the sloop: three officers who were in it came on deck, without testifying any fear, although it was the scene of a busy struggle between our comrades and the Dutch sentry, who wanted to free the soldiers from the hold. The first word of the eldest officer was to ask for the ringleader, and all remaining mute, I spoke in French:—"Indeed that there had been no plot, but that it was by a simultaneous movement that we had resolved on throwing off the slavery imposed on us; we had ill-treated no one, as the captain and sailors could testify, who knew it was our intention to have left them in possession of the vessel, after we had landed at Anvers." I know not what effect my harangue produced, for I was not allowed to finish it; only, whilst we were piled up in the hold, in the place of the soldiers whom we had confined there on the previous evening, I heard some one say to the pilot, "that more than one would swing at the yard-arm next morning." The sloop was then turned towards Helvoetsluys, and we reached that place the same day, at about four o'clock in the afternoon. In the roadstead was anchored the Heindrack. The commandant of the fort went in his cutter, and in an hour afterwards I was conducted thither also. I found there assembled a sort of maritime council, who questioned me as to the particulars of the mutiny, and the part I had taken in it. I asserted, as I had already done to the fort governor, that having signed no articles of engagement, I thought myself justified in effecting my escape by any means that presented.
I was then ordered to retire, to make way for the young man of Tournai, who had seized the captain.
