general demoralization and defection of the French soldiery, by a pitiless application of military discipline; one of the judicial tragedies of the city.
A detachment of Swiss was quartered at Ship Island, which was under the command of a Frenchman, Duroux. The island is a mere dot of white sand in the Gulf, a veritable pearl, which at a distance dances and plays in the gay blue water. It seems totally inadequate to the amount of human suffering which has been experienced upon it, in later times as a military prison of most cruel hardships, and then as the scene and opportunity for the brutality of Duroux. The isolated spot was his kingdom, and he used his soldiers as if no one before him had fittingly illustrated the meaning of "tyrant." He sold their rations and gave them for food only what they could gather from the wreckage of the Gulf. Instead of performing their military duties, they were forced to till his garden, cut timber for him, and burn the charcoal and lime out of which he drove a profitable private trade. His exactions of work would have been considered beyond human endurance, had he not hit upon a form of punishment which experience proved to be clearly so. He simply stripped his criminals naked, and tied them to trees; and the mosquitoes, those voracious mosquitoes of the Gulf, accomplished the rest. In desperation, some of the soldiers ran away to the capital, carrying their complaints to the governor, and a piece of the bread they were given to eat. Kerlerec, a naval martinet, sent them immediately back to Ship Island. Then the Swiss took the case in their own hands, and had recourse to the time and world-renowned measures of the over-burdened.
One day, as Duroux's boat neared the strand, after a
