‘I studied busic udder the great Jo’d Brahub,’ he answered, wagging his head with his indescribable leering smirk, that was deepened and made more repulsive, if possible, by the drink he had swallowed; the moon shone very clear, and expressions on the face were easily read. ‘If I car’t si’g, who cad? By lay was Hi-taliad opera, but the ri’g answered by purpose better.’
This he spoke in the most gentlemanly manner his tipsiness would suffer. Mr. Bates saw my meaning.
‘I’ll go with you below, sir, and drink your health, and hope to have the pleasure of hearing you sing another song.’
‘Cub along,’ said the prize-fighter, and both men went down the steps.
The din in the cuddy was still vile and distracting; but it wanted its former volume. I looked through the skylight and found as much of the table as I could see thick with the stupefied brutes, who, seated, lay upon it from their waists in every sort of drunken posture, most of which not a man amongst them could have put himself into had he been sober. A score and more lay without life or motion on the cabin deck, but numbers were awake, and pannikins of grog were being handed along. The haze of the tobacco smoke hung dark as a river-fog.
I walked to the break of the poop and counted some twenty or twenty-five dark figures lying helplessly insensible in various parts of the main- and quarter-deck; men reeled out of the cuddy, as I looked, fell down, with their hands outstretched, and never moved. It was as Tom said: the wretches had not tasted liquor for months, and many of them for years, and now they had been swallowing fiery ship’s rum, I know not how many degrees above proof.
(I once, in Mr. Stiles’s time, put my tongue to a ‘neat’ dram or ‘tot,’ as it is called, and was burned as though by a flame.)
Numbers, I doubted not, had swallowed the burning poison undiluted. The spectacle of the quarter-deck, above all the sight of the figures lurching out and then dropping as though shot, was sickening and frightful.
I went back to Tom. As I passed the skylight, Abram began to sing; but his voice was full of drink, very hideously thick and his delivery tuneless. I was sure, after pausing an instant to listen, that he would soon be amongst those who were laid low.
‘I shall make for that brig,’ said Tom, ‘when we get away.’