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Untitled Article
companion , ordered the steward to serve us out the day ' s allowance , and give as hammocks ; and we were shown into a hole ; the descent to it was by notches cut in the angles of a post , against which , polished by greasy hands , a knotted rope was suspended : this hole was called the steerage : in some ships it is the
afterhold , here it was after-hold , cable-tier , and steerage , in one : as yet I did not descend : I stood on the deck gazing on the intricacy of method in the infinity of cordage , till my brain gnawed itself in the perplexity , and to escape from it I looked about from stem to stern . I saw some eight or ten men , with hard and rugged , weather-beaten visages , not so trimly rigged' as Hopkins and his
comrades were , distributed here and there , and huddled together on the forecastle as many more of the most squalid , dirty-bearded , matted-haired wretches , stockingless and shoeless , with such enormous splay feet , their bodies covered , or partly covered , by fragments of various coloured garments : the wildest creatures I had ever looked upon . I never had imagined man in such a
state ; and what faces ! each man carried a countenance of reckless misery , a hatred of hope , a defiance of despair , or it was despair mocking itself . My soul was sick as I looked upon them , and they laughed at me aloud ; and then a sudden burst of confused yells , laughter , and hideous curses arose;—whence ? from the caverns of the ship . I looked down , and as I did so , a hot
and pestilential effluvia rose and enveloped me . I looked through a heavy wooden grating , across which was a strong iron bar , with a huge padlock attached to it ; and I saw that which threw me back almost fainting with horror ! My throat felt as if it were filled with lumps of something which produced a sense of strangulation ; and how fiercely my heart did ' knock at my ribs against the use
of nature ! ' I remember I bent myself forward , bowing my head down upon my breast , for some minutes after , retreating from the grating , as if 1 would by that quell the violent and audible beating . In that short glance , I had seen a crowded mass of disgusting and fearful heads , with eyes all glaring upwards from that terrible den ; and heaps of filthy limbs , trunks , and heads , bundled and
scattered , scrambling , laughing , cursing , screaming , and fighting , at one moment . Ere long I learned what they were ; among them were the offscourings of villany , the refuse of jails , beings whose infamy was their source of merriment , their solace in captivity ! There too were men whose lives and characters were unimpeachable , both in law and custom ; industrious men , on whose
reputation the world's breath could not cast a blemish , who had been forcibly seized from their hearth-sides ; I heard much of their histories afterwards : there were men also , who , closing months of toil and peril , or years of hope-encouraged perseverance , in distant climes , returned to their native shores to be kidnapped , as their foot was in the act of kissing the strand , or suddenly intercepted as their arms were stretched forth to give and to receive
Untitled Article
544 Autobiography ofPeL Verjuice *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 544, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/32/
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