Page:The Naval Officer (1829), vol. 2.djvu/200

 make acquaintance with my companions in misery—and nothing conduces to intimacy so much as community of suffering. My resistance to the brutality of our common task-master had pleased them; they told me what a tyrant and what a disgrace to the service he was, and how shameful it was that he should be entrusted with the command of so fine a vessel, or of any vessel at all, except it were a convict ship. The stories they told me of him were almost incredible, and nothing but the too well founded idea, that an officer trying his captain by a court-martial, had a black mark against him for ever after, and was never known to rise, could have saved this man from the punishment he so richly deserved: no officer, they said, had been more than three weeks in the ship, and they were all making interest to leave her.

In my report of what occurred in this vessel during the time I belonged to her, I must, in justice to the captains and commanders of his