Note 54-1 — CAPTAIN EDWARDS' REPORTS.

Among the people who boarded the ship from Tofoa Lieut. Hayward recognized some of those who attacked Bligh's boat four days after the mutiny, and murdered Quartermaster Norton, but solicitude for the crew of the tender, which might call there, prevented Edwards from punishing them as they deserved. No doubt, both at Tofoa and Namuka, the natives would have attempted to take the ship had they thought success possible as, we now know, they had planned to capture Cook's ships, and as they actually did capture the privateer Port-au-Prince in 1806 at Haapai. In 1808 William Mariner, one of the survivors of that ill-fated ship, who has left behind him the best account of a native race that exists probably in any language, was led by the strange native account of Norton's murder, to visit his grave. The natives asserted that Norton was killed by a carpenter for the sake of an axe which he was carrying; that his body was stripped and dragged some distance inland to a Malae where it lay exposed for three days before burial; and that the grass had never since grown upon the track of the body nor upon its resting-place on the Malae. Mariner found a bare track leading inland from the beach and terminating in a bare patch, lying transversely, about the length and breadth of a man. It did not appear to be a beaten path, nor were there people enough in the neighbourhood to make such a path. Probably it was an old track, long disused and forgotten, for by such natural causes is man's belief in the supernatural fed.