Above everything else, I think, the wretched food made us unhappy. If a man be but well fed he can endure much hardship and trouble, and I had never wanted in this respect. The prison food was bad, ill cooked, and meagre; and though Joe, for one, might have procured better if he had chosen to employ himself in his old trade of coopering, he refused to do so after making one barrel, the price of which, after the soldiers' commission had been deducted, was something less than a fourth of what it would have been in England.
"'Noint my block!" he cried, when the pitiful sum was placed in his hand. "Dost think a Shrewsbury man 'll be done out of his dues by a codger of a Frenchman what he don't vally no more than pork slush or a stinking dogfish? Split my binnacle if I be!"
And he flung the money at the amazed Frenchman, and kept his word to work at his old trade no more.
I think this sturdiness of his raised him somewhat in the estimation of our jailers, and in spite of the opprobrious epithets he applied to them (which to be sure they did not understand) he was soon as popular with them as Vetch was the reverse. Joe was blessed with a great fund of good humor, which withstood all privation and restraint. He growled and groaned at being compelled to take his turn in scouring the floors and other menial tasks, but after emitting a stream of hot language, which ever appears to flow very freely from the lips of sailor men, he went his way with great cheerfulness. He joked with his fellow prisoners, and being of a loquacious turn, had many things to tell them of the doings of his hero, Captain Benbow.
Vetch, on the contrary, was what the Scriptures call a "continual dropping." He kept himself apart, sulking the livelong day, scarce ever speaking, and when he did speak using a tone which the Grand Turk might employ towards a beggar. It was true enough that the prisoners were inferior to him in quality, but, their lot and circumstances being the same, it was decidedly a mistake to make the others feel their inferiority, and, as I think, a mark of ill breeding to boot. His few words were sneers, and he had a contemptuous way of looking at a man that made one itch to thrash him. At length he was thrashed, and very smartly, by a man in our dormitory, and after that he was utterly ignored, by general consent. It happened in this wise.
One bleak day of mud and rain, when we were driven by the weather out of the courtyard into the lower rooms of the barracks, and were sitting in doleful dumps, at a loss how to pass the time, Joe Punchard cried out of a sudden:
"Come, souls, what's a spell of foul weather to men that have sailed the salt seas! Haul forward your stools, mates, and we'll have a concert and make all snug. I warrant some of you can troll a ditty, though ye be too modest to own it; and not being plagued wi' modesty myself, I'll heave anchor first."
I knew, nothing of Joe's musical powers, and it was with no little surprise I discovered that he had an excellent voice of the pitch they call barytone. He began:
Of all the lives, I ever say,
A pirate's be for I;
Hap what hap may he's allus gay
And drinks an' bungs his eye.
For his work he's never loath;
An' a-pleasurin' he will go;
Tho' sartin sure to be popt off,
Yo ho, with the rum below.
At the conclusion of the stanza his audience broke into loud applause. And then, with a sheepish air that set me a-smiling, Joseph Runnles, my bedfellow, the little silent man of whom I have spoken, drew out of his pocket the parts of a flute, and putting them together, set it to his lips and accompanied Joe through the next stanza, picking up the tune with a facility that spoke well for his musical ear.