“My wish would have been just the opposite, that there might be an end of me, Effie, if I had happened to be in a battle since I was flogged: but the battles I was in happened first; and if I was not a downright coward, I had no spirit to fight as a freeman would. It cooled my blood, and kept down my heart, to remember the night when they took me in my sleep to defend others when I was myself defenceless.”
“If it was so with you,—you, who always used to walk first when, as children, we had to pass neighbour Topham’s bull,—you, that were ready to go down doubtful places in the mine when nobody else dared, and that brought out the soldier, just drowning in the current by Cullercoat Sands,—if it was so with you, how much more it must happen with others, not naturally so brave! But, Cuddie, do sit down quietly, and tell me, as if you were telling of being punished for bird-nesting, what it was that they blamed you for on board ship.”
“Blamed me! They——”
“Yes, yes—I know; but what was it for?”
“I did nothing well, all the time I was there. Whatever might be going on, I was always thinking of getting away;—just the same, whether I was on watch, or going into the middle of the fight, or hiding my face in the blanket, when laid by under my dog punishment. There was enough to flog me for, if the quality of my service had been all that was looked to.”
“You that did everything well that you set your hand to, from the time you were a child! But the getting away you managed cleverly, I dare say.”
“A good many contrive to do that, notwithstanding all the difficulties that are put in the way of desertion, and the punishment that visits it.”
“That punishment cannot always take place, if so many desert. There would be a constant putting to death.”
“Why, yes; considering that above five thousand able-bodied, and four thousand ordinary seamen have deserted within two years, the execution of the whole is a sight that men would be rather unwilling that angels should look upon.”
“Mercy, mercy! Only think of them all in one crowd before a judge, pleading how they were torn, many of them, from their busy homes, and that these same homes were the temptation to desert.”