On a pallet, close by his bed, lay another seaman of the same
ship, who had likewise been abused by the same men, and bore more
ostensible marks of ill usage than this man did, about the head and face.
There is a most dreadful state of things aboard our ships. Hell itself
can be no worse than some of them, and I do pray that some New-Englander
with the rage of reform in him may turn his thoughts this way. The
first step towards better things--the best practicable step for the
present--is to legalize flogging on shipboard; thereby doing away with
the miscellaneous assaults and batteries, kickings, fisticuffings,
ropes'-endings, marline-spikings, which the inferior officers continually
perpetrate, as the only mode of keeping up anything like discipline. As
in many other instances, philanthropy has overshot itself by the
prohibition of flogging, causing the captain to avoid the responsibility
of solemn punishment, and leave his mates to make devils of themselves,
by habitual and hardly avoidable ill treatment of the seamen.
After I left the dying sailor, his features seemed to contract and grow
sharp. Some young medical students stood about the bed, watching death
creep upon him, and anticipating, perhaps, that in a day or two they
would have the poor fellow's body on the dissecting-table. Dead
patients, I believe, undergo this fate, unless somebody chooses to pay
their funeral expenses; but the captain of the Assyria (who seems to be
respectable and kind-hearted, though master of a floating hell) tells me
that he means to bury the man at his own cost.
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