done in almost solid darkness. The sights which the lights revealed were of the horridest. Here a man with a gashed face, there another almost cut in two, there another riddled with the bayonet, there one -yes, yet living-with four bullets through him. The aspect of the place was that of a slaughter-house. Eight dead bodies were found on the forecastle and three on the main-deck, including the European sentry and the Portuguese cook.

It was now apparent why the sentry had not answered the hail of the mate-the poor fellow was found to have been stabbed to the heart. There seems, unfortunately, to be no doubt that he had left his post below and come on deck, where he is supposed to have fallen asleep, being stabbed without awakening even to fire his pistol, which was in his hand as he lay. Had he been at his post, or even awake on deck, alarm might in all probability have been given sufficiently early to have prevented the convicts gaining the deck at all. The poor cook was shot by accident, being mixed up with the convicts.

The carpenter and an Arab passenger jumped overboard. The former fell into the bight of the lee fore sheet, got into the fore chains, and made his way aft. The Arab was never seen again. At daybreak a man was found hanging on to the rudder. A rope being let down, he was hauled up, and was found to have been shot through the leg.

On search being made below, five more bodies were found of men who, on receiving enough, had gone below to die. It was found that the convicts had escaped by cutting through with a knife, of which they had somehow gained possession, a bar of a prison door forward, then partly cutting through the inside partition bar on the port side, which enabled them to burst the door in altogether. They then shouted to the rest in other cells to follow them, which, with the exception of fourteen, whom the guard were enabled to keep down, they did.

At six the convicts were mustered, when it was found that twentyeight were dead or missing-twenty-eight out of sixty who came on deck. The remaining thirty-two, with the exception of three wounded, were treated to three dozen each.

At half past nine the sentries gave the alarm that some of the convicts had slipped their leg irons. The guard was called and secured them. On overhauling the remainder it was found that many of the irons were too large, and they were accordingly reduced.

THE RIFF PIRATES.

A letter from Paris says:--" The expedition which the Spanish government is preparing against Morocco has directed public attention to the pirates of the Riff, who first drew upon them the serious attention of Europe by their audacious attack, three years since, on a Prussian

squadron, commanded by Prince Adalbert of Prussia. Most people then for the first time learnt, and not without astonishment, that there existed at the gates of Spain, and not far from the French establishment in Algeria, Moorish tribes exclusively occupied in acts of piracy. The Riff is a province of Morocco, situate at the extreme N.E. of that empire on the Mediterranean, and separated from Algeria by the desert of Angad and of Lalla Maghunia. Protected by steep rocks, which jut out into the sea, the inhabitants of the Riff conceal themselves in the little creeks on the coast, to surprise merchant ships on their passage, and at the moment of danger they take refuge in the mountains, where it is difficult to follow them, as Prince Adalbert discovered when he made his attempt to punish them. Attention has been called to this nest of pirates by their late attacks on the Spanish settlements. M. Richard, a French officer of engineers, says, in a history he wrote of the insurrection in the Dahara in the years 1845 and 1846, that Abd-el-Kader wished to make the province of the Riff the base of his operations in a general insurrection to dethrone the Emperor of Morocco, and set himself up in his place. According to M. Richard, the Douera of the Emir was to be the nucleus of a new State, which from the mountains of the Riff was simultaneously to fight against the Emperor Muley-Abdel-Rhaman and the French in Algeria. The Riff constitutes a province almost independent, and which is connected with Morocco by the sole tie of religious fanaticism. It extends from Tetuan to Moulonia, and is divided into sixteen large villages or tribes, each governed by a Sheik. All the inhabitants are pirates. The village of Azanon particularly, situate at the bottom of a small bay of that name, is renowned for the ferocity of its inhabitants. The Azaneens belong to the savage tribe of the Guelaia. They are well supplied with firearms, and with rudely constructed barques. Several English and French merchant vessels have fallen into their hands, and have been pitilessly pillaged. A part of the population of the Riff live in caverns and among the rocks on the sea shore. One point alone of the coast is accessible for the landing of troops. This is in a small bay not far from Cape Tres-forcas, but a surprise even at this place is difficult. The French might send an expedition which, setting out from Nemours, Tlemcen, Lalla Maghunia, Sebsca, and Geronville, would take the mountainous districts of the Riff in rear, and would exterminate the pirates or drive them into the sea. But such an expedition would raise the entire empire of Morocco, and the successor of Abdel-Rhaman himself would, if he wished to consent to such a proceeding, be prevented by the fanaticism of his people, who are now agitating against the French on the other side of the Moulonia. Persons well acquainted with Africa regard the late attack of the Moorish tribes against the French advanced posts as the prelude to a more serious invasion of the western frontier of Algeria."

THE LATE GALES.

We have been again visited by a gale as severe as any yet experienced in this country and as usual our shores have been strewed with wreck. We find by the Shipping Gazette that it commenced at N.E. to E.N.E., and after blowing for some time with singular fury from those points, drew gradually to the southward and westward, and finally round to N.W., at which point it appears to have terminated. This was just the course to sweep the lines of coast most frequented by our shipping.

"On the coast of Anglesea, however, has occurred a casualty which demands a separate and special notice. The Royal Charter, to whose performances in the Australian trade we have had so frequently occasion to refer in terms of admiration, had arrived on Monday evening last at Queenstown, with 450 passengers and a large amount of specie, after a run of fifty-eight days from Melbourne. The following night, when the storm was at its height, the ship, it is said, was seen off the bar of Liverpool, but, being unable to get in, put out to sea as her only alternative. The next we hear is that, a few hours afterwards, the illfated vessel drove on shore on the coast of Anglesea, some six or seven miles westward of Beaumaris, with the loss of at least 400 lives. It is probable, from the fact of the Royal Charter making a lee shore of the N.W. point of Anglesea, that the gale had shifted after she left the mouth of the Mersey, and that her Commander did not, or could not, give the coast of the island a sufficiently wide berth. The passengers who left the ship at Queenstown are no doubt congratulating themselves on their providential escape; and we have only to say, that if passengers generally made it a practice to leave the ship on its arrival at the first port of call at the conclusion of the voyage, the loss of life on these coasts in passenger ships would be considerably diminished. The Royal Charter was as likely as any ship we are acquainted with to go safe through the Channel navigation at all seasons. But the Royal Charter, that but a few hours since carried a costly freight and a still more costly assemblage of lives, lies now a battered wreck on the Welch coast, almost within sight of her port! There is a moral in all this which, in these days of rapid inter-communication, ought not assuredly to be disregarded.

"It will not surprise those acquainted with the nature and dangers of this coast, to find that the loss of life and property during the late gale, so far as ascertained, has occurred just at the places named by the Royal Commissioners as requiring the instant expenditure of the public money for the construction of Refuge Harbours. Hartlepool, St. Ives Bay, the Bristol Channel-these are the localities where the dread traces of the recent tempest are most visible, and to which the attention of the legislature and of the government has been drawn from time to time in the columns of this journal, and, within the past year, by a body of men expressly nominated by the Crown to examine and report upon the existence of a necessity which every winter enforces by terrible examples. It is not too much to say that if a suitable and suffi

cient number of Asylum Harbours had now been constructed on our coasts, the losses during the last few hours might have been considerably diminished, and that, until those works are carried out, the sacrifice of human life and property, which occurs season by season, rests with those to whom the nation entrusts its best interests, and the allocation of the public money."-Shipping Gazette.

THE LOSS OF THE STEAMER "EXPRESS."

Southampton.

The course se

The Board of Trade inquiry into the loss of the above steamer, which was wrecked on the Corbière Rocks off the coast of Jersey, has come to a termination without any result. It will be recollected that the inquiry took place before Mr. Bernard and Captain Engledue (magistrates), and Captain Harris, nautical assessor for the Board of Trade. The inquiry occupied three days, viz., the 12th, 13th, and 15th of the present month; and a number of witnesses were examined, comprising the captain and officers of the ship, and several of the passengers who were on board at the time the ship was run ashore. lected by the captain (Mabb) of the Express, at the time she struck on the rocks, was a narrow channel known as the St. Jaileur's passage, by which fifteen minutes were saved, and the evidence relative thereto was of a most contradictory character, one set of witnesses affirming that the Express passed on the port side, and others stated that she passed on the starboard side of a rock named the Frouquis. Under these circumstances the magistrates could not decide upon the case, and the court was adjourned in order that the evidence might be laid before the Board of Trade for their decision.

On the re-assembling of the Court,

The chairman (Mr. Bernard) said, I was in hopes that the Board of Trade would have pointed out some course which we might have taken to enable us to come to an agreement, but this they have not done, and the magistrates are still of different opinions. Under these circumstances it is difficult to know what to do; but I have drawn out a report which I shall send to the Board. I cannot do otherwise than return Captain Mabb his certificate without expressing any opinion upon the case. I have no power to retain it.

The certificate was then returned to the captain, and the inquiry terminated.

THE SCHOOL FRIGATE CONWAY AT LIVERPOOL.-Captain C. H. E. Judkins, commanding the British and North American Royal Mail Company's steamship Persia, received on his last voyage home from his passengers (including Mr. Henry Christy, of London, who gave the liberal donation of £50), and a number of American friends, the sum of £90, to be applied for the purposes of a school frigate. Although the Conway has only been open for the reception of lads since the 1st

of August last, there are now being educated and trained on board her more than fifty, a number of whom are the sons of commanders of ships belonging to Liverpool, and others the orphan children of late commanders. The object of the institution is to train a thoroughly respectable class of lads for sea, giving them at the same time a sound practical education, and at least one foreign language. It originated among the merchant captains of Liverpool; and when such men as Captain Judkins, commodore of the Cunard fleet, are so impressed with its usefulness, and are as active in its promotion as he has proved himself to be, we have no need, we are assured, to advocate its cause, or to ask all his brother captains, to the best of their ability, to follow his example. A vote of thanks has been unanimously passed to Captain Judkins by the committee of management.

New Books.

MEDELINGEN UIT HET OOST-IN DISH-ARCHIEF, door Mr. L. C. D. Van Dijk, &c. Amsterdam, J. H. Scheltema, 1859.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHICAL ELUCIDATIONS to the Discoveries of Maerten Gerrits Vries, Commander of the Flute Castricum, A.D. 1643. Amsterdam, Frederick Muller; London, Trubner, 1859.

It is now above a quarter of a century since Navarrete gave to the world the account of the voyages of the early Spanish navigators as they had left them, to remain in the dusty archives of that office over which (in his turn) he presided at Madrid. The measure was a most excellent one; and among its good effects may be reckoned that of showing the island which Columbus first landed on in America, and the whole progress of discovery which he made in his first voyage. Had the letters of Columbus never been published, the world (that is, the careful part of it, for there is a careless part also,) would have continued in doubt between the two theories upholding islands, said to have been discovered by him, neither of which had he beheld. But when we have before us the words of the Navigator himself, his apparently most trivial expressions, as well as his most important decisions, all receive due attention.

It was truly said, that Columbus unlocked the gates of the New World in the West; those of the East in the Old having been long previously unlocked but only fairly opened by modern, indeed we may say recent, treaties. China and Japan, but a few years ago, were still closed to us; and desiring to continue in their exclusive ignorance. That is, the governing authorities always told us to go away, they could do without us, and would never be satisfied till we were gone. Still the old principle has prevailed: man is a social animal; he is not to keep his gifts from his fellows, nor to be inaccessible to them, or to turn a deaf ear to wants which he can supply. Since in the present year of grace this grand principle has been asserted and established, we now turn to the early accounts of navigators, who have long ago discovered distant shores, for the benefit of their experience in the navigation of them. Navarrete bas given us those of the Spaniards. Where are those of the Portuguese? a people too among the earliest of voyagers! Let the question remain for the Portuguese to answer! The French have given us theirs in abundance, and at length we are about to receive those of the Dutch.

The two volumes abovementioned are similar in their nature. In the first