“Who must we yield to? where are they?” says Smith again. “Here they are,” says he; “here is our captain and fifty men with him, have been hunting you this two hours; the boatswain is killed, Will Fry is wounded, and I am a prisoner; and if you do not yield, you are all lost.”
“Will they give us quarter, then?” says Tom Smith, “and we will yield.” “I’ll go and ask, if you promise to yield,” says Robinson. So he asked the captain, and the captain himself then calls out, “You, Smith, you know my voice; if you lay down your arms immediately and submit, you shall have your lives, all but Will Atkins.”
Upon this Will Atkins cried out, “For God’s sake, captain, give me quarter! what have I done? they have all been as bad as I” (which, by the way, was not true either: for it seems this Will Atkins was the first man that laid hold of the captain when they first mutinied, and used him barbarously, in tying his hands and giving him injurious language). However, the captain told him he must lay down his arms at discretion, and trust to the governor’s mercy, by which he meant me; for they all called me governor.
In a word, they all laid down their arms, and begged their lives; and I sent the man that had parleyed with them and two more, who bound them all; and then my great army of fifty men, which, particularly with those three, were in all but eight, came up and seized upon them all, and upon their boat; only that I kept myself and one more out of sight, for reasons of state.
Our next work was to repair the boat, and to think of seizing the ship; and as for the captain, now he had leisure to parley with them, he expostulated with them upon the villainy of their practices with him, and at length, upon the further wickedness of their design; and how certainly it must bring them to misery and distress in the end, and perhaps to the gallows.
They all appeared very penitent, and begged hard for their lives: as for that, he told them they were none of his prisoners, but the commander’s of the island; that they thought they had set him on shore in a barren uninhabited island, but it had pleased God so to direct them, that the island was inhabited, and that the governor was an Englishman; that he might hang them all there, if he pleased; but as he had given them all quarter, he supposed he would send them to England, to be dealt with there as justice required, except Atkins, whom he was commanded by the governor to advise to prepare for death; for that he would be hanged in the morning.
Though this was all a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect. Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God’s sake, that they might not be sent to England.
It now occurred to me, that the time of our deliverance was come, and that it would be a most easy thing to bring these fellows in to be hearty in getting possession of the ship; so I retired in the dark from them, that they might not see what kind of a governor they had, and called the captain to me: when I called as at a good distance, one of the men was ordered to speak again, and say to the captain, “Captain, the commander calls for you;” and presently the captain replied, “Tell his excellency I am just a-coming.” This more perfectly amused them; and they all believed that the commander was just by with his fifty men.
Upon the captain’s coming to me, I told him my project for seizing the ship, which he liked wonderfully well, and resolved to put it in execution the next morning.
But in order to execute it with more art, and to be secure of success, I told him we must divide the prisoners, and that he should go and take Atkins, and two more of the worst of them, and send them pinioned to the cave where the others lay: this was committed to Friday and the two men who came on shore with the captain.