ed sufficiently on one side,
the man who had the place to the extreme right would call: round about
turn! and all would simultaneously turn to the other side, then having
received quantum sabis on this one the man to the left would give the
same signal. The maintainance was on an equal scale. Today bacon and
peas--peas and bacon tomorrow. Once in a while this menu was broken by
porridge or peeled barley, and as an occasional great feast by pudding.
This pudding was made of musty flour, half salt and half sweet water and
of very ancient mutton suet. The bacon could have been from four to five
years old, was black at both outer edges, became yellow a little farther
on and was white only in the very centre. The salted beef was in a very
similar condition. The biscuits were often full of worms which we had to
swallow in lieu of butter or dripping if we did not want to reduce our
scanty rations still more. Besides this they were so hard that we were
forced to use canon balls in breaking them into eatable pieces. Usually
our hunger did not allow us to soak them, and often enough we had not
the necessary water to do so. We were told (and not without some
probability of truth) that these biscuits were French, and that the
English, during the Seven Years' War had taken them from French ships.
Since that time they had been stored in some magazine in Portsmouth and
that they were now being used to feed the Germans who were to kill the
French under Rochambeau and Lafayette in America--if God so wotted. But
apparently God did not seem to fancy this idea much.

The heavily sulphured water lay in deep corruption. After a barrel had
been hoisted up and opened, the deck was pervaded by a conglomeration of
very evil odours indeed. It was full of worms as long as a finger and
had to be filtered through a cloth before it could be drunken. And even
then it was dangerous to breathe above it. Rum and sometimes a little
strong beer helped to make it somewhat more drinkable.

Herded together in this manner, forced to breathe putrid air, to eat bad
food and to drink foul water, these youths, old men, students, merchants
and peasants, many of them but insufficiently clothed, were tossed about
for months upon the Atlantic.

Many of the sufferings undergone by us on this voyage were no doubt
unavoidable, and many of the recruits were used to a hard
life--nevertheless, many of the things they endured were the result of
an intentional deficiency of