Chapter 77

But the story got about. It reached England. A busybody, Charles M. Thomas, who had been purser on board H.M. sloop _Demarara_, but had been imprisoned on suspicion that he had defrauded the Government, wrote home to Mr. C. Bathurst, brother of the M.P. for Bristol, to this effect: "I deem it a duty I owe to humanity, to inform you that Captain Lake, when commander of the _Recruit_, set a man belonging to that vessel on shore at Sombrero, an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Archipelago, where he died through hung…