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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
suffered many , and storms were his common-places ; then , as to scars , it was hardly possible to find a fresh spot to tap him afc He told his story with a quiet indifference ana naivete worth a thousand pages of bare description , and his eye wandered aloft to the sails at times in a way that showed how little interest he took in his own eventful history , and how ready he was to " knock off" and pipe to the watch with the first breath of wind .
I remember I made the following very natural reflection upon him : " Here is a poor common fellow , of no particular strength of mind or body , who has seen and suffered all these vicissitudes , as a matter of course , merely from the chance of being a sailor . How different is this from the doll monotonous life of a tradesman
ashore ; he rises in the morning-, serves his retail all day , eats his dinner , has ' words' with his wife , goes to church on Sunday , dies of worn-out flesh , and is buried decently . His son carries on the business . " The chief boa ' son ' s mate of the larboard watch was a gigantic black man , whose name was White . Like most men of prodigious bodily strength , he was habitually grave , dull , and
quiescent ; the choice of that name , for it was not his real one , was probably the onl y joke he ever made in his life . He had fought successfully in the prize-ring several times , and had left it on finding his colour was against him . It was well known that he had alone quelled a mutiny that took place aboard a vessel he was in , by running headlong among the ship ' s company , and attacking , or rather cowing , above a hundred men . The sailors insisted that he had thrashed them all . He was the handsomest
African I ever saw , having little of their squab features . The upper part of his truly colossal frame was perfect symmetry , and the smallness of his fine-formed narrow head and retiring forehead ( as a physical character ) and the make of the back of the neck , always reminded me of the Pliarnese Hercules ;
particularly when he stood leaning against the shaded side of the mast , or with his shoulder lounged upon the gang-ways , as he bent over the sea . There was the same grave slumberous dignity of power about him . And he was self-conscious too , and seemed to be aware of the altitude and position of his limbs ; but I have continually noticed the personal vanity of black men . He had a wife in the Cove of Cork , who went to service when he went to sea ; nevertheless , he allowed her half his pay , though he approved of her working , because , as lie remarked in his peculiar solemn way , " it would keep her out of mischief . " lie was a firm believer in conjurors , second-sighted people , and ghosts of every description , several of which he had seen , as he said , " with his own eyes . " I committed an error in saving he fttoly made one jest in his life ; he made two , and though he was never
Untitled Article
JVQ . I ^ The Voyage . 613
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1836, page 613, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2662/page/25/
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