Nation

added.
    And the next day Cox shot the old man in the canoe. Daphne would like to report that every sailor in the crew was angry because the old man had been shot, and in a way it was true, but many of the men were less concerned about the sanctity of souls than they were about the possibility that the old man had relatives nearby with fast canoes, sharp spears, and an unwillingness to listen to explanations. And there were even a few who held that one old man more or less didn’t matter, but Cox and his cronies had been shooting at dolphins, too, and that was cruel and unlucky.
    In the end there was a war, and so much bad blood had been bubbling that there seemed to Daphne to be more than two sides. She sat it out in her cabin, seated on a small barrel of gunpowder with a loaded pistol in her hand. The captain had told her that if Cox’s men won, she should fire the pistol into the barrel “to save her honor,” though she was uncertain how much a saved honor would be worth when it was falling out of the sky in tiny pieces, along with the rest of the cabin. Fortunately she did not have to find out, because Captain Roberts ended the mutiny by detaching one of the Sweet Judy ’s swivel guns and aiming it at the mutineers. The gun was intended for firing lots of small lead balls at any pirates who might try to board the ship. It was not intended to be a hand cannon, and if he had fired the thing, the recoil would probably have thrown him into the air, but everyone in front of it would have died of terminal perforations. There was a fury about him that even Cox took note of, Cookie had told her. The captain had the look in his eye of the Almighty confronting a particularly wicked city, and maybe Cox was just sane enough to recognize that here was someone who might be even madder than he was, at least for the time it took to turn Cox and those around him into much smaller lumps. Or, Cookie said, the captain may have been about to commit wild murder right up until he realized that this was what Cox wanted, and the devil of a man would drag the captain’s soul to hell along with his own.
    But the captain didn’t fire the gun, said Cookie. He laid it on the deck. He straightened up with his arms folded and a grim little smile on his face, and Cox just stood there, looking puzzled, and then every single loyal crewman pointed a pistol at his head. The steam got knocked out of the mutiny. Cox and his chums were herded into the ship’s boat with food, water, and a compass. And then of course there was the matter of the guns. The mutineers still had friends among the crew, who said that leaving them in uncertain waters without weapons was a death sentence. In the end the guns were left for them on a little island a mile away, despite Captain Roberts declaring that in his opinion, any pirate or slaver who ran into Cox and his men would have a new captain in very short order indeed. He ordered the swivel guns primed and ready day and night, and said that the boat would be fired on instantly if it was ever seen again.
    The boat was set adrift and sailed, her crew silent and worried except for Polegrave and Foxlip, who jeered and spat. That was because they were too dumb to realize, said Cookie, that they were heading off into bad waters with a murderous madman in command.
    The Judy never really recovered, but she kept on course. People didn’t talk much, and kept to themselves when they were off watch. She wasn’t a happy ship at all. Five men had previously jumped ship at Port Henry and so, without the mutineers, there weren’t enough men to crew the ship properly when the wave came.
    And that was the story Daphne told. She tried to be honest, and where she’d relied on Cookie’s rather excitable stories, she said so. She wished she had Pilu’s talent; he could make tripping over a stone sound like a desperate adventure.
    There was silence when she finished. Most people turned to look at Pilu. She’d done her best in a foreign language, but she’d seen the puzzled looks.
    What Pilu gave them was the story all over again, but with acting, too. She could make out the character of Captain Roberts, heavy and pompous, and surely the one who sidled around was Polegrave, and the one who stamped and roared was Cox. They shouted at one another all the time, while Pilu’s fingers popped like pistols and somehow, in the middle of the air, the story unfolded.
    A certain extra touch of slightly mad realism was added by the