With their privations, insubordination increased. Some separated themselves from the rest, and settled a league away; some built a boat, and going up the lagoons about the island, were never heard of more. Worse than all, some in authority misbehaved themselves, especially a midshipman named Cozens, who had gained some influence over the men.
Cozens had a dispute with the surgeon; then he quarrelled with the purser, and was unquestionably of a mutinous disposition. Still it is certain that Captain Cheap exceeded his powers when he drew out a pistol and shot Cozens down. What was worse, he refused permission for the wounded man to be carried into the tent, "but allowed him to languish for days on the ground, and with no other covering than a bit of canvas thrown over some bushes," until he died.
Unhappily Captain Cheap distinguished himself in nothing but severity. He never shared the sufferings of his men when he could help it; and though our narrator, Midshipman Byron, stuck to him to the last, it is plain he thought him a worthless creature.
This loyal young fellow was of good family, and became grandfather of the great Lord Byron, into whose imagination never entered stranger things than actually befell his ancestor.
The midshipman had built a little hut, just big enough to contain himself and a poor Indian dog he found straying in the woods. To this animal in his misery he became much attached. But a party of seamen came and took the dog by force, and killed and ate it. Indeed, three weeks afterward, when matters became much worse, Byron himself, recollecting the spot where the poor animal had been killed, "was glad to make a meal of the paws and skin which had been thrown aside."
The straits to which they were by that time reduced sharpened their ingenuity to the utmost. The boatswain's mate, having procured a water puncheon, lashed a log on each side of it, and actually put to sea in it, like the wise men of Gotham in their bowl, and with the assistance of this frail bark he provided himself with wild fowl while the others were starving. Eventually he suffered shipwreck, but was so little discouraged by it that out of an ox's hide and a few hoops he fashioned a canoe "in which he made several voyages."