"Pass a rope's-end here, some o' you! Now, my young swabs, stow your precious blubbering, or I'll pound you all into jelly. What a rum carawan of a Noah's ark we should have, if we stood such nonsense aboard a king's ship!"
CHAPTER XVI.
THE WHITE-SLAVE SHIP.
I shall never forget the emotions of horror and disgust which came over me, on finding myself under the forehatch of this prison-ship, for such it literally was.
About sixty squalid, bloated, drunken, and miserable wretches, whose fierce or pallid visages were visible by the dim light that shone through a species of grated ballast-port, were huddled together in a space that was too low to admit of their either standing or sitting with ease. The state of the atmosphere was frightful. Our arrival was a signal for every kind of jest and brutality. Our pockets were searched, and not a penny being found on any of us, we were hooted, cursed, and cuffed without mercy. Among this rabble were several seamen, who had been recently captured, and were now intoxicated and furious from the effects of the coarse whiskey supplied at an enormous price by a bumboat woman, whose craft lay close to the grating, and in whose supply of alcohol they sought to drown all sense of care and consciousness; freely, however, sharing their money and liquor with the thieves and other refuse of society who had been sent on board the tender.
In a corner I sat, crouching down, bewildered and confounded by the stench of tobacco and bilge, of rags and filth,—by the babel of oaths, songs, obscenity, and drunken familiarity, amid which I found myself. Some of them quarrelled and fought, shrieking and blaspheming as they rolled in a heap over each other, and then the sentinel at a grating in the bulkhead only laughed as he surveyed them—the fiends of this floating pandemonium—and poked at those who came near him with the point of his cutlass.
Giving a wild glance around this horrible and suffocating place, I clasped by hands, and, bursting into tears, exclaimed, again and again,—
"Oh! what a disastrous destiny is mine!"
Ashamed or afraid lest this most natural emotion might be seen, and subjected to brutal mockery by the unfortunates about me, I crept close to the ballast-port, and fixed my eyes wistfully upon the shore, towards which the ripples of the rising tide ran in long lines of glittering gold. It was about the hour of one in the day. The sun of June shone in all its brilliance amid a clear, blue, cloudless sky. I saw the distant city, with its castle, its spires and lines of streets rising ridge over ridge upon its seven hills. I saw the green undulations of the beautiful Pentlands, and the far expanse of varied coast that stretched to the eastward, vibrating apparently in the hot sunshine, and mellowing in the warm haze, faint and far away.
I clutched the horrid grating, and shook it, panting for liberty and escape. I saw in the distance a hill and clump of trees that overlooked my mother's cottage. Reflection nearly drove me mad, and the reader may imagine, but I can never depict, how in my soul I abhorred the avaricious hypocrite and the civic tyrant who had hurried me on such a fate.