264 THE LIVERPOOL BUCCANEERS. 



street as they moved onwards at a funeral pace, and within their 

 lines (each one attended by two officers of military police) came the 

 pirates, the clanking of whose fetters responded to each sad step they 

 took. They were on their way to die ! On the prior evening they 

 had all taken the sacrament, with every sign of repentance for their 

 crime ; the full extent whereof, in so far as related to himself, had 

 been confessed by the captain. He now led the way, the first in 

 rank and guilt ; and, as the torch light gleamed upon his dark Italian 

 features, the change that had come ovep the once hardened and 

 miserable man was fearfully apparent. His keen dark brilliant eye, 

 as it was directed upwards, as if to ascertain how far it was yet from 

 day to death had an expression of dull despair, such as I never yet 

 had witnessed ; his face was livid, and his steps were tottering ; but 

 I subsequently learned that it was more the fate of those whom he 

 preceded to the scaffold than his proper suffering that had now so 

 enervated him. The others, even to the youth Curtis, bore them- 

 selves like men : patient, sorrowing, and resigned, with little display 

 of any touch of physical dread. As the morning broke, the walls of 

 Valetta and the four cities on the opposite side of the harbour were 

 crowded with myriads of human beings, who, in silence as in- 

 tently gazed upon a small vessel, painted black, which lay in the 

 centre of the harbour, and where preparations were going on for the 

 consummation of the great penalty the law had decreed. Of the 

 eight men condemned, six took their stations on the scaffolding be- 

 neath the main-yard of the William. Marshall (a man of excellent 

 character, until seduced by Delano) and Curtis being doomed to 

 witness the death of their comrades as the scaffolding fell, and they 

 were launched into eternity. A reprieve, justified by the confessions 

 of those who were now more, was communicated to them ; and the 

 almost delirious joy of the two spared wretches was little less 

 affecting than the dreadful scene which they were there to view. 

 The bodies of the four most hardened and guilty pirates, Delano, 

 Thompson, Smith, and Lewis, yet hang in chains, on gibbets erected 

 on the north west angle of Fort Ricasoli, at the entrance of the 

 harbour of Malta; and it is to be hoped that the mercy of the 

 Almighty has been extended to the souls of those miserable men, 

 who while on earth had little mercy for others.* 



die became what seamen term water- logged, and although filled with water yet 

 floated, probably from the absence of the cargo, and was actually cast a wreck 

 upon the Spanish shore some clays subsequently. 



