Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/220

182 age of it in their open boats, across a thousand miles of the Indian Ocean, and reached the same Dutch port of Coupang where Lieutenant William Bligh had found refuge. Here they met the actors in still another thrilling drama of an open boat. A party of British convicts, including a woman and two small children, had stolen away from the penal settlement of Port Jackson on the coast of Australia in a ship's gig, and had fled by sea all the way to Timor, living on shell-fish and seabirds and surviving ten weeks of exposure and peril.

They told the Dutch governor at Coupang that they were castaways from an English ship, and he believed the tale until the people of the Pandora came into port. Assuming they were survivors of the same wreck, a Dutch officer remarked to one of the convicts that the captain of their ship had reached Coupang. Caught off his guard, the fellow blurted:

"Dam' me! We have no captain."

The cat was out of the bag, and the slip proved fatal. Haled before the governor, the runaways confessed who they really were. The tale they told was interwoven with a romance. The leader of the party, William Bryant, had been transported to Botany Bay for the crime of smuggling, and with him went his sweetheart, Mary Broad, who was con-