ar was carried about the decks in large iron
pots, and converted into vapour by the insertion of red-hot metal bars.
The swabbers brought pans of burning pitch or brimstone into every
corner, so that the smoke might penetrate everywhere. But even then the
decks were not wholesome. There were spaces under the guns which no art
could dry, and subtle leaks in the topsides that none could stop. The
hold accumulated filth, for in many ships the ship's refuse was swept on
to the ballast, where it bred pestilence, typhus fever and the like. The
bilge-water reeked and rotted in the bilges, filling the whole ship with
its indescribable stench. Beetles, rats and cockroaches bred and
multiplied in the crannies, until (as in Captain Cook's case two
centuries later), they made life miserable for all on board. These
wooden ships were very gloomy abodes, and would have been so no doubt
even had they been dry and warm. They were dark, and the lower-deck,
where most of the men messed, was worse lit than the decks above it, for
being near to the water-line the ports could seldom be opened. Only in
very fair weather could the sailors have light and sun below decks. As a
rule they ate and slept in a murky, stuffy atmosphere, badly lighted by
candles in heavy horn lanthorns. The gloom of the ships must have
weighed heavily upon many of the men, and the depression no doubt
predisposed them to scurvy, making them less attentive to bodily
cleanliness, and less ready to combat the disease when it attacked them.
Perhaps some early sea-captains tried to make the between decks less
gloomy by whitewashing the beams, bulkheads and ship's sides. In the
eighteenth century this seems to have been practised with success,
though perhaps the captains who tried it were more careful of their
hands in other ways, and the benefit may have been derived from other
causes.

[Footnote 27: The mortality among the sailors was very great.]

Discipline was maintained by some harsh punishments, designed to "tame
the most rude and savage people in the world." Punishment was inflicted
at the discretion of the captain, directly after the hearing of the
case, but the case was generally tried the day after the commission of
the offence, so that no man should be condemned in hot blood. The most
common punishment was that of flogging, the men being stripped to the
waist, tied to the main-mast or to a capstan bar, and flogged upon the
bare back with a whip or a "cherriliccum