Accordingly, precautions were taken to counteract the conspiracy of the Malay crew and capture the pirate by putting on board arms and munition—of which they supposed the ship to have none—and concealing in the saloon a force of blue-jackets to combine with the English part of the crew should the contemplated mutiny break out—the result of which precautions proved, as we have seen, to be eminently successful.
While the calm lasted, the bodies of the dead pirates were hove overboard, and the three bluejackets and Phillips who had lost their life in the first struggle with the Malays committed carefully to the deep with every solemnity; and then the Hankow Lin, as soon as the wind sprang up again, as it did by sundown, was headed towards Singapore in accordance with Lieutenant Meredith’s wish, although it was sorely against Captain Morton’s will to bear off from his direct course to England, which was almost right in front of him, the Straits of Sunda bearing a point or two off the lee beam.
However, Captain Morton lost nothing by his compliance with the lieutenant’s wish. The Hankow Lin when she arrived at Singapore was allotted a half share of the value of the pirate schooner and all she contained; and that craft being pretty nearly crammed full of plunder, which she had accumulated from the different ships that had been captured and scuttled by her in her nefarious career, the sum thus awarded to Captain Morton was more than sufficient to compensate his owners for any delay that had arisen through the Hankow Lin’s detention at the Dutch port, besides swelling the handsome bounty that was paid to each and all of the crew engaged in the affair.
This was not all, either.
At Singapore, Captain Morton was able to obtain what he could not have very well voyaged home without, and that was a supply of fresh hands to navigate the ship in place of the treacherous scoundrels who had engaged with him at Canton only to plot her destruction, although the captain had ample satisfaction for all this ere he left the place, for, as Bill the boatswain said in mentioning the fact afterwards, he “saw every mother’s son of them hung before he weighed anchor again.”
After bidding adieu to their late active comrades the blue-jackets, all went well with the old vessel, from Singapore to the Straits of Sunda, across the Indian Ocean, and round the Cape of Good Hope. Not an untoward event happened on the way home, not a mishap occurred, and, as Snowball said when he stepped ashore in the East India Dock, “All’s well dat ends well.” And so ended The Voyage of the “Hankow Lin.”