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.