When the hearing commenced, in the year 1884, Pelletier came before the arbitrator in perfect health and with the appearance of a man of ability and of fortune. After an acquaintance of about a year I was able to use this language in my final arguments: "It is a singular circumstance that Captain Pelletier has not produced an original paper or document in support of his claim. He is sixty years of age or more. He is a man not deficient in intellectual capacity, whatever else may be said of him. He is endowed by nature with ability for large and honest undertakings. He claims to have had an extensive business experience; to have been the possessor of large wealth; to have been trusted in fiduciary ways; and he comes here and claims compensation for a great outrage, as he alleges, upon his person and his rights; and yet he has not produced a paper that has the signature of any being, living or dead, by which he can sustain the claim he makes. What is his answer in regard to the absence of papers? It is that they were on board the bark _William_. According to the best information we can obtain, that bark was not less than twelve or fifteen years of age. We know that it did not much exceed two hundred tons burden. It was bound on a voyage into tempestuous seas; and, leaving behind him wealth, as he says, to be measured by the million, he embarks on that vessel with all his papers, including title deeds, articles of copartnership, powers of attorney, and preliminary accounts relating to unsettled affairs. He is a member of the house of Delauney, Rice & Co., in which he had deposited his patrimony to the extent of fifty thousand dollars; and he carries away on that frail bark all evidence of his investment in that firm. He had, he said, a partnership agreement; he had accounts of profits that had been rendered from time to time,--and all are gone. He had a dear wife and two children, for whose loss he now demands large compensation; and yet he carried away the evidence of which their right to his estate would have depended, in case of his death. The statement may be true, but in the nature of things it is not probable. That we may believe a statement of that sort, evidence is required, not from one man unknown, not from one man impeached, but from many men of reputable standing in society. It is not to be believed that a man who had been engaged in transactions measured by hundreds of thousands of dollars, through a period of ten years, should take every evidence of those transactions on board a vessel of hardly more than two hundred tons burden, manned by a crew composed of highbinders, as he has described them, and sail to foreign lands, over tempestuous seas, upon the poor pretext of procuring guano for the plantations of Louisiana,--and this, as he says, when war was imminent."