"See, here, youngster! Ain't you the fellow that was put in command of these men?"
I acknowledged such to be the case.
"Well," said the Captain; "I want you to 'tend to your business and straighten them around, so that we can clean off the decks."
I turned from the bulwark over which I had been contemplating the vasty deep, and saw the sorriest, most woe-begone lot that the imagination can conceive. Every mother's son was wretchedly sea-sick. They were paying the penalty of their overfeeding in Wilmington; and every face looked as if its owner was discovering for the first time what the real lower depths of human misery was. They all seemed afraid they would not die; as if they were praying for death, but feeling certain that he was going back on them in a most shameful way.
We straightened them around a little, washed them and the decks off with a hose, and then I started down in the hold to see how matters were with the six hundred down there. The boys there were much sicker than those on deck. As I lifted the hatch there rose an odor which appeared strong enough to raise the plank itself. Every onion that had been issued to us in Wilmington seemed to lie down there in the last stages of decomposition. All of the seventy distinct smells which Coleridge counted at Cologne might have been counted in any given cubic foot of atmosphere, while the next foot would have an entirely different and equally demonstrative "bouquet."
I recoiled, and leaned against the bulwark, but soon summoned up courage enough to go half-way down the ladder, and shout out in as stern a tone as I could command:
"Here, now! I want you fellows to straighten around there, right off, and help clean up!"
They were as angry and cross as they were sick. They wanted nothing in the world so much as the opportunity I had given them to swear at and abuse somebody. Every one of them raised on his elbow, and shaking his fist at me yelled out:
"O, you go to ——, you —— —— ——. Just come down another step, and I'll knock the whole head off 'en you."
I did not go down any farther.