I strained my sight, and then barely distinguished the vessel in the obscurity some distance from the edge of the flood of moonshine.
‘It’s a dead calm,’ I said.
‘It matters not,’ he answered.
‘Shouldn’t we first contrive to roll those fellows off the poop?’ said Will at the wheel, meaning the figures upon the deck.
‘It’ll take them all night to sleep off what they’ve got,’ answered Tom. ‘I hope Bates won’t allow them to make him drunk. He’s afraid of Abram.’
‘Where are the rest who came up with the prize-fighter?’ said I.
‘Gone below for more drink.’
We stood conversing in whispers. Abram’s singing had subdued, but only subdued, the noise in the cabin, yet we could hear one another when we whispered. After twenty minutes, Mr. Bates came up. I regarded him anxiously. His face shone in the moonshine as though he had just lifted his head out of a bucket of oil.
‘The heat below! Oh, the heat below! It’s wonderful they’re not all dead men!’ he exclaimed.
He told us that he had managed to empty his pannikin on the deck before putting it to his lips. They had handed him pure rum to drink. Had he swallowed the dose he must have fallen down insensible. The people close to him were too drunk to observe him. He dexterously, whilst seeming to watch Abram, as though to catch his eye to drink his health, poured out the contents of the pannikin, and did not know that the rum had splashed over a man’s face until he looked down. The man, lying like one dead upon the deck, received the discharge without a stir. It seems, however, that Mr. Bates need not have put himself to any trouble to feign drinking. Abram got on to the double chair and began to sing, without taking any notice of the mate. In the midst of his song he stopped to lift a pannikin to his lips, which he emptied, and was then proceeding, when the upper chair gave way and he fell. After the prize-fighter had lain a few moments groaning in sickness, he clawed his way to one of the cabins, and Bates came on deck.