who were only
permitted to come on deck twice a day, morning and evening, for a few
Mouthfuls of Fresh air; who were fed on the vilest biscuit and the most
putrid water, getting but a scrap of fat pork and a dram of Rum that was
like Fire twice a week, and who were treated, generally, much like
Negroes on the Middle Passage. But by and by,--say after ten days; but I
took little account of Time in this floating Purgatory,--Captain
Handsell had me unironed; and his cabin-boy, a poor weakly little lad,
that could not stand much beating, being dead of that and a flux, and so
thrown overboard without any more words being said about it--(he was but
a little Scottish castaway from Edinburgh, who had been kidnapped late
one night in the Grass Market, and sold to a Greenock skipper trading in
that line for a hundred pound Scots--not above eight pounds of our
currency)--and there is no Crowner's Quest at sea, I was promoted to the
Vacant Post. I was Strong enough now, and the Wound in my side gave me
no more pain; and I think I grew daily stronger and more hardened under
the shower of blows which the Skipper very liberally dealt out to me; I
hardly know with more plenitude when he was vexed, or when he was
pleased. But I was not the same bleating little Lamb that the Wolfish
Gnawbit used to torture. No, no; John Dangerous's apprenticeship had
been useful to him. Even as college-lads graduate in their Latin and
Greek, so I had graduated upon braining the Grenadier with the demijohn.
I could take kicks and cuffs, but I could likewise give them. And so, as
this Roaring Skipper made me a Block to vent his spite upon, I would
struggle with, and bite, and kick his shins till sometimes we managed to
fall together on the cabin-floor and tumble about there,--pull he, pull
I, and a kick together!--till the Watch would look down the skylight
upon us, grinning, and chuckle hoarsely that old Belzey, as they called
their commander (being a diminutive for Beelzebub), and his young Imp
were having a tussle. Thus it came about that among these unthinking
Seamen I grew to be called Pug (who, I have heard, is the Lesser Fiend),
or Little Brimstone, or young Pitchladle. And then I, in my Impish way,
would offer to fight them too, resenting their scurril nicknames, and
telling them that I had but one name, which was Jack Dangerous.

The oddest thing in the world was that the Skipper, Ungovernable Brute
as he was, seemed to take a kind of liking for m