The wreck of the Trafalgar became matter of history in an age when philanthropy, or the affectation of it, takes the lead in public.
“Ha!” said Lee to his companion, when they heard, some months after, of the fate of felons like themselves, “what a fool you would have made of yourself if you had given yourself up as you wished.”
Poor Martin Gray would at the moment this was said have gladly changed places with the hardest-worked convict in Norfolk Island.
But I must not anticipate my tale.
I have said that Lee had “rapidly chalked out in his mind’s eye a map of his plans.” These were rather facilitated in prospect by the unexpected advent of a companion; and on rising the following morning, he drew out such a sketch of his intended operations as induced Gray, of necessity, to assent to them.
In the first place, he, Gray, knew Lee to be a desperate man, albeit certain indulgences, the result of a morbid spirit of philanthropy—an endemic peculiar to England—had been granted to the latter on board the convict-ship; and he had thus, comparatively with the other voyagers, been placed beyond complaint. Secondly, there was only the alternative of giving himself up as a deserter. On the one hand, was infinite space in a fine country, with strange promises from his comrade, a daring and clever man; on the other, at best, a renewal of servitude under a yoke he had been taught by a miserable fatality to dislike.
Their resolution once taken, they determined, with wise precaution, on leaving no traces of concealment in a locality so dangerous by its proximity to the military post; for, although the river to the westward still remained impassable, and there was no likelihood of an invasion from the eastward, it was not to be doubted that ere long the scene of the wreck would prove of sufficient interest to bring some to the spot in search of such plunder as the tide might cast up. This territory, held, in Kafir parlance, by “the sons of Congo,” contained, besides the kraals and pasture-lands of its chiefs and their people, a few traders’ huts, and three or four mission stations, all widely separated from each other.