Chapter XVI: The White-Slave Ship

I shall never forget the emotions of horror and disgust which came over me, on finding myself under the forehatch of this prison-ship, for such it literally was.

About sixty squalid, bloated, drunken, and miserable wretches, whose fierce or pallid visages were visible by the dim light that shone through a species of grated ballast-port, were huddled together in a space that was too low to admit of their either standing or sitting with ease. The state of the atmosphere was frightful. Our arrival was a signal for every kind of jest and brutality. Our pockets were searched, and not a penny being found on any of us, we were hooted, cursed, and cuffed without mercy. Among this rabble were several seamen, who had been recently captured, and were now intoxicated and furious from the effects of the coarse whiskey supplied at an enormous price by a bumboat woman, whose craft lay close to the grating, and in whose supply of alcohol they sought to drown all sense of care and consciousness; freely, however, sharing their money and liquor with the thieves and other refuse of society who had been sent on board the tender.

In a corner I sat, crouching down, bewildered and confounded by the stench of tobacco and bilge, of rags and filth,--by the babel of oaths, songs, obscenity, and drunken familiarity, amid which I found myself. Some of them quarrelled and fought, shrieking and blaspheming as they rolled in a heap over each other, and then the sentinel at a grating in the bulkhead only laughed as he surveyed them--the fiends of this floating pandemonium--and poked at those who came near him with the point of his cutlass.

Giving a wild glance around this horrible and suffocating place, I clasped by hands, and, bursting into tears, exclaimed, again and again,--

"Oh! what a disastrous destiny is mine!"

Ashamed or afraid lest this most natural emotion might be seen, and subjected to brutal mockery by the unfortunates about me, I crept close to the ballast-port, and fixed my eyes wistfully upon the shore, towards which the ripples of the rising tide ran in long lines of glittering gold. It was about the hour of one in the day. The sun of June shone in all its brilliance amid a clear, blue, cloudless sky. I saw the distant city, with its castle, its spires and lines of streets rising ridge over ridge upon its seven hills. I saw the green undulations of the beautiful Pentlands, and the far expanse of varied coast that stretched to the eastward, vibrating apparently in the hot sunshine, and mellowing in the warm haze, faint and far away.

I clutched the horrid grating, and shook it, panting for liberty and escape. I saw in the distance a hill and clump of trees that overlooked my mother's cottage. Reflection nearly drove me mad, and the reader may imagine, but I can never depict, how in my soul I abhorred the avaricious hypocrite and the civic tyrant who had hurried me on such a fate.

My mother! the thought of her--of _home_, and where I was, filled me with paroxysms of grief, and rage, and agony; for in boyhood we feel, I think, with greater acuteness than in after years.

After a time, and as the evening came on, amid the horrors of the place, I sat in a state of bewilderment amounting almost to torpor. I doubted the reality of my senses, and kept repeating,--

"It is a dream--I am asleep. When awake, I shall find myself in bed at home."

From this dream I was, however, soon awakened to a painful sense of reality by a kick or a blow from some of the wretches about me, as they quarrelled and fought with each other.

As night descended a deeper despair came over me; yet I prayed, not to God, but, poor boy that I was, to my mother.

I thought of her alone now, and a thousand acts of kindness and of her maternal love--of my neglect and selfishness--came out of the chaos of my mind, and stood vividly and upbraidingly before me. Even Amy and Lotty were forgotten, or merged in the single idea of _her_--her desolation, her age, and sorrow, and a terror lest I should never see her more. Could I foresee the future!

When the boom of the evening gun from the guardship, pealing with a thousand reverberations over the calm flow of the beautiful river, announced that the sun had gone down beyond the western hills, a hubbub of voices on deck also informed us that the crew of the pressing tender were casting loose the canvas, heaving short on the anchor, and preparing for sea.

As soon as her boats were hoisted in, and the tender was under weigh, the hatch was opened, and we were all ordered on deck from our stifling den, which a party of seamen proceeded at once to swab and deluge with buckets of water. The cutter was standing down the broad estuary of the Forth, but making long tacks, as the wind blew stiffly from the eastward.

I was now doomed to witness a scene which filled me with fresh terrors. A miserable and delicate-looking boy, who had been pressed--illegally kidnapped like myself--proving refractory, by order of Mr. Cranky (an officer of a species happily long since extinct), was tied up to the weather shrouds, and, while screaming piteously, was lashed on the bare back till he was covered, first, with livid bars, and then with clotted blood. Ere this he had fainted, but a bucket or two of salt water was dashed over him "to bring him to," and then he was carried below.

This exemplary exhibition rather tamed the tempers of the pressed men, who gazed blankly into each other's faces, and a few of them became completely sobered by it.

I had great difficulty in repressing an emotion of nausea on witnessing this revolting mode of punishment; but, plucking up courage, I began to look about me, with the resolution of confronting and grappling with my evil destiny, and of taking means, by fire, water, or bloodshed--I cared not which, for I had grown desperate--of escaping on the first opportunity.