Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/518

 Everything being in readiness, the Custom-house and other regulations complied with, and the crew on board, the vessel was placed under charge of a

fourteen persons slept in hammocks suspended from the beams, and had their daily food. There was no room for tables, chairs, or stools, so that the tops of their sea-chests in which they kept their clothes and all their possessions, were substituted for those useful and necessary household articles. In fact so closely were these chests packed that it was difficult to sit astride them, the mode which the sailors found most convenient for taking their meals, especially in rough weather. But the whole of this limited space was not appropriated to the use of the crew, for it contained a rough deal locker, in which the beef and soup-kids and other utensils were kept, while the stout staunchions or knight-heads which supported the windlass on the upper deck came through the forecastle, and were bolted to the lower beams; and too frequently, when the ship was very full of cargo, a row of water-*casks and provisions were stowed along the after-bulkhead, which was a temporary erection; while on the top of these, cables, coils of rope, and numerous other articles were piled. At all times it was a foulsome and suffocating abode, and in bad weather the water and filth which washed about the deck and among the chests and casks created the most intolerable and loathsome stench. Here, however, these fourteen sailors and apprentices slept, washed, dressed, and had their food, except in fine weather, when they took their meals on deck, their food consisting almost entirely of inferior salted pork, beef, which was sometimes nearly as hard and unpalatable as the kids in which it was served, and brown biscuits, too often mouldy and full of maggots. To make matters worse, the forecastle of the ship to which the Author refers was full of rats, and he has the most vivid recollection of one of these animals on more than one occasion finding its way into the hammock where he slept. In the West Indies the place was so suffocatingly hot that the sailors invariably slept wherever they could find a clear place upon deck or in the tops; and in winter, when approaching the English Channel, or when on an intermediate voyage to the Bay of Fundy, it was as bitterly cold, no stoves or fires of any kind being allowed on board except in the galley and in the cabin. No Siberian slaves ever suffered so much from the intensity of the cold as did those of the sailors and apprentices of that ship, who had not deserted, during two months of a winter when she lay at anchor in one of the roadsteads of the Bay. The bow ports were then obliged to be open to receive the cargo, and could only be covered with matting during the night. One of these ports opened upon the forecastle, so that its occupants might almost as well have slept upon deck, their]*
 * [Footnote: tarpaulin guards, too frequently found its way through the scuttle. Here