‘Ay, but what did he die of?’ he shouted. ‘I’ve asked Hemmeridge, and he won’t give the disease a name. I don’t want it to go further, but betwixt you and me and the bedpost, hang me’—here he subdued his voice into an extraordinary croaking whisper—‘if I don’t believe that Hemmeridge’—and he lifted his hand to his mouth in a posture of drinking. ‘My contention is, they’ve got no right to keep the body. What’s the good of it? Since Hemmeridge is mute, who’s going to say that the seaman didn’t die of smallpox? That’s it, you see! Smallpox! and a crowd of creatures forward who are infernally negligent in cleanliness, as all sailors are, not to mention a mob of us aft who, if a plague should break out, must perish. Mind, I say perish! Where’s that second-mate?’
He impetuously crossed the deck and hurried forward on the weather side of the poop.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said the fellow at the wheel, speaking in a deep, bass, salt voice; ‘’tain’t for the likes of me to say nothen, leastways here;’ he made a step to leeward, holding a spoke at arm’s-length, to expectorate over the rail, and then returned: ‘but I’ve heerd the bo’sun say as that you’ve been a sailor-man in your day, and I know that the gent that’s just left ’ee is a sojer. And I should ha’ taken it very koind if, when he told ye that we was an oncleanly lot forrards, you’d ha’ called him a bloomin’ liar.’
‘So he is, my man,’ said I, ‘whether I tell him so or not.’
‘I’ve been a-sailing in troopships ower and ower again,’ exclaimed the fellow, half-stifling himself, to subdue his angry voice, ‘and I could tell that there gent this—that spite of all his pipeclay and the ship-shape looks of him outside, there ain’t an oncleanlier man than the guffy. You let him know that, sir; and if he dorn’t believe it, and the capt’n’ll gi’ me leave, smite me! if I won’t ondertake to argue it out wi’ him to the satisfaction of every party as chooses for to listen, either aft’—striking the wheel a blow with his immense fist; ‘or forrads’—another blow; ‘or down in the hold’—a third blow; ‘or up in that there maintop;’ and here he fetched his thigh a whack that sounded like the report of a firearm.
‘Wheel there! where are you driving the ship to?’ shouted the second-mate from the forward part of the poop; but merely as an excuse, I think, to break away from the colonel, who had now tailed on to him.
As he came rumbling aft, I went forward.
It was the most delicate gentle weather imaginable next morning when I went on deck an hour before breakfast-time to get a cold bath in the ship’s head, which to my mind is the very noblest luxury the sea has to yield: nothing to be done but to strip, drop over the side on to the grating betwixt the headboards, well out of sight of the poop, where the spout of the head-pump, as it is called, commands you, and so be played on for half-an-hour at a spell by some ordinary seaman, who will be glad to oblige you for the value of a glass of grog. Oh, the delight past language of the sensation sinking through and through one to the very marrow that comes with the gushing of the sparkling green brine pouring away from one in foam back into the flashing heart of the deep out of which it is sucked!
As I passed the fore-hatch on my way aft, I observed a heap of something lying under a tarpaulin; at the same moment the boatswain stepped out of his berth.