I put my foot over and easily went down an almost perpendicular ladder. I found myself in a somewhat strange interior. On the right, or starboard, hand was a long cabin, which Will afterwards told me had been designed for a midshipman’s berth. This cabin was occupied by the unmarried soldiers. On the left-hand side were a number of rough whitewood cabins, rudely erected—such cabins as are put together for the use of poor emigrants. The married couples and children slept in them. Light descended through the booby-hatch, but the day was very scowling, as you know, and it needed some use to see well. A couple of tables were cleated athwartships, and two or three of the women were preparing them for dinner. A few soldiers were sitting about reading or talking. In one of the berths a baby was crying loudly, and several children sat in a group in a corner playing.
The good-looking young wife came from some part of these quarters, or barracks, as I descended. She showed me a married couple’s sleeping-berth, and bade me, as I was a young man, put my head boldly into the single men’s cabin and not mind them. I seemed to look, but in truth I had no eyes but for the strong, gloomy, prison-like bulkhead which served as the afterwall of the convicts’ prison. This bulkhead stretched from side to side. It was studded with iron knobs, mushroom-shaped. A number of holes were bored in it—perhaps twenty. I knew the object of those holes. They were intended to receive the muzzles of muskets, so that a volley of twenty muskets could be fired at once into the throng of convicts confined below in case of an uprising or other tragic trouble. I also observed what resembled a disk in the centre of this barricade, somewhat low down. I asked the woman what it meant. She inquired of a soldier, who answered that it had been a hole to receive the muzzle of a cannon, but that the orifice had been stopped.
‘It’s handy to command with grape and canister in case of a difficulty,’ said the soldier, speaking with an Irish accent. ‘A great gun, loaded to the muzzle, is the right way to keep an oye upon such lads as thim yonder. ’Tis wan of them oyes that never winks nor slapes.’
On the right of the barricade was the door, where stood the sentry—the ‘Dick’ of my pretty companion. I had supposed that the main-hatch was the only means of entering the ’tweendecks; but this afterdoor, it seems, was always used by the doctor for going his rounds.
‘Tell him to look and be quick, Jane,’ said the sentry.
‘Clap your eye to a hole,’ said the young woman. ‘Dick dursn’t open the door for you.’
I did so, and saw almost as much as if the sentry had opened the door. The light was faint and dim; such daylight as there was hung round about the main-hatch where the stanchions came down from the sides of the hatch in the form of a gigantic square bird-cage. There were no scuttles or portholes, no skylights for the admission of light or air overhead. The place seemed full of men, shadowy heaps of them, with a number of dim shapes in motion, giving a look of wild, unnatural vitality to such of the ghostly mob as sat and were at rest.
The soldier’s wife put her eye to a loophole beside mine. I asked her what those restless figures were about, and she answered they were messmen and mess helpers preparing for the convicts’ dinner by half-past twelve. A double tier of sleeping shelves divided into compartments, each wide enough to accommodate several men sleeping side by side, ran the whole length on either hand of these ’tweendecks. I heard a subdued growl of voices and the frequent clank of irons, but high above all sounded the ceaseless straining and crazy complaining of the numerous bulkheads which went to the equipment of the ship in this part.
Far forward on the left was a sort of cabin; I knew it was the prison by Will’s description. The hospital lay in this end, and I could not see it. The air was fairly sweet and fresh where I stood, owing to the booby-hatch lying wide open, protected as it was by the cuddy recess; but I seemed to fancy a dreadful oppression and closeness of atmosphere in those ’tweendecks where the many shadowy shapes were herded. Which of all those spectral figures was Tom? Oh, my heart! To think of him in his innocence, ironed, entombed in that close and dimly-lighted prison, forced to lie of a night, side by side with felons, obliged to listen to their hideous talk, to their boasts of past crimes, to their threats of darker villainies yet, when the moment should come to free their hand.
‘Now, Jane, your friend must be off,’ said the sentry, ‘or the doctor’ll be coming along.’