NAVAL OFFICERS AND SEAMEN, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
“You are enjoying your dinner, but have been for some time sensible of a strange, titillating feeling about the region of your ankle; you look down at last, to find a centipede on your sock, with his fifty hind legs—you thank God not his fore-fifty!—abutting on your shin. Tableaux: green-to-red light from the eyes of the many-legged—horror of yourself as you wait till he thinks proper to ‘move on.’
“To awake in the morning, and find a large, healthy-looking tarantula squatting on your pillow, within ten inches of your nose, with his basilisk eyes fixed on yours, and apparently saying: ‘You’re awake, are you? I’ve been sitting here all the morning, watching you.’
“You think, if you move, he’ll bite you somewhere—and if he does bite you, you’ll go mad, and dance ad libitum—so you twist your mouth in the opposite direction, and ejaculate—‘Steward!’ But the steward does not come; in fact, he is forward, seeing after breakfast. Meanwhile, the gentleman on the pillow is moving his horizontal mandibles in a most threatening manner; and just as he moves for your nose, you tumble [pg 222]out of your bed with a shriek, and, if a very nervous person, probably run on deck in your shirt!”
The doctor’s last description of an accumulation of these horrors is fearful to even think about. The bulkheads all around your berth are black with cock and hen-roaches, a few of which are nipping your toe, and running off with little bits of the skin of your leg; while a troop of ants are carrying a dead one over your pillow; musquitoes and flies attacking you everywhere; rats running in and rats running out; your lamp just flickering and dying away into darkness, with the delicious certainty that an indefinite number of earwigs and scorpions, besides two centipedes and a tarantula, are hiding themselves somewhere in your cabin! All this is possible; still Dr. Stables describes life on other vessels under more favourable auspices.
The important addition of a chaplain to the establishment on board our ships of war seems, from the following letter of George, Duke of Buckingham, to have been first adopted in the year 1626:—
“The Duke of Buckingham to the University of Cambridge.
“After my hearty commendations. His Majesty having given order for preachers to goe in every of his ships to sea, choyce hath been made of one Mr. Daniel Ambrose, Master of Arts and Fellow of your College, to be one. Accordingly, upon signification to me to come hither, I thought good to intimate unto you, that His Majesty is so careful of such scholars as are willing to put themselves forward in so good actions, as that he will expect—and I doubt not but that you will accordingly take order—that the said Mr. Ambrose shall suffer noe detriment in his place with you, by this his employment; but that you will rather take care that he shall have all immunities and emoluments with advantage, which have been formerly, or may be, granted to any upon the like service. Wherein, not doubting of your affectionate care, I rest,
“Your very loving friend,
“G. Buckingham.
“York House, July 29th, 1626.”