The mutability of human greatness was excellently pourtrayed whilst the Pandora’s officers remained at Coupang, a captive King in chains being compelled to blow the bellows for the English armourer, whilst he was employed forging bolts and fetters for his own countrymen. See Hamilton’s Account of the Pandora’s Voyage, p. 146.
From Coupang they were conveyed in the Rembang, a badly found and worse managed Dutch Indiaman, to Samarang, and Batavia, at which latter place they anchored on the 7th Nov., after a very dangerous passage of 33 days, the ship being twice nearly driven on shore, and proving so leaky as to render it necessary for every person on board to work at the pumps – a species of liberty which the prisoners were allowed to enjoy until their strength entirely failed them, when they were again placed in irons and suffered to rest their weary limbs on an old sail, alternately soaked with rain, salt water, and the drainings of a pig-stye under which it was spread.
At Batavia Captain Edwards distributed the purchase money of the schooner among his people, in order that they might furnish themselves with nankeen apparel; and the prisoners, having their hands at liberty, availed themselves of this opportunity to obtain some articles of clothing, by making straw hats for sale, and acting as tailors to those who had thus become comparatively rich by the produce of their labour as shipwrights. It was in a suit thus purchased that Mr. Heywood arrived at Spithead, after an absence of four years and a half all but four days. The patience, fortitude, and manly resignation evinced by him at that early period of life, were such as excited the admiration of his family and friends; and may be inferred from the following passages contained in letters written by him at a period when charged by his persecutor, Lieutenant Bligh, with the crimes of ingratitude, mutiny, and desertion – charges sufficient to shake the strongest nerves.
