ull of
grog and prize-money; four hundred and seventy impressed men, cursing,
blaspheming, and imprecating every species of calamity on their captors;
added to which, a crowd of Jews, bumboat women, and slop-sellers of all
kinds, with the crews of two ballast-lighters, fighting for additional
pay, being the chief actors in a scene whose discord I never
saw equalled. Drunkenness, suffering, hopeless misery, and even
insubordination, all lent their voices to a tumult, amid which the words
of command seemed lost, and all effort at discipline vain.

How we were ever to go to sea in this state, I could not even imagine.
The ship's crew seemed inextricably mingled with the rioters, many of
whom were just sufficiently sober to be eternally meddling with the
ship's tackle; belaying what ought to be 'free,' and loosening what
should have been 'fast'; getting their fingers jammed in blocks, and
their limbs crushed by spars, till the cries of agony rose high
above every other confusion. Turning with disgust from a spectacle so
discordant and disgraceful, I descended the ladders, which led, by many
a successive flight, into the dark, low-ceilinged chamber called the
'sick bay,' where poor Santron was lying in, what I almost envied,
insensibility to the scene around him. A severe blow from the hilt of a
cutlass had caused a concussion of the brain, and, save in the momentary
excitement which a sudden question might cause, left him totally
unconscious. His head had been already shaved before I descended, and
I found the assistant-surgeon, an Irishman, Mr. Peter Colhayne,
experimenting a new mode of cupping as I entered. By some mischance
of the machinery, the lancets of the cupping instrument had remained
permanently fixed, refusing to obey the spring, and standing all
straight outside the surface. In this dilemma, Peter's ingenuity saw
nothing for it but to press them down vigorously into the scalp, and
then saw them backwards the whole length of the head--a performance the
originality of which, in all probability, was derived from the operation
of a harrow in agriculture. He had just completed a third track when I
came in, and, by great remonstrance and no small flattery, induced him
to desist. 'We have glasses,' said he, 'but they were all broke in
the cock-pit; but a tin porringer is just as good.' And so saying, he
lighted a little pledget of tow, previously steeped in turpentine, and,
popping it into the tin vessel, clapped it