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Seamen pray little; less than they ought, amid the rude scenes of their hazardous lives. Still, I had not quite forgotten the lessons of childhood, and sometimes practised on them. That night I prayed fervently, beseeching God to spare my sister, if in his wisdom it were meet; and I humbly invoked his blessings on the excellent divine, and on Lucy, by name.
I began to see terror in the faces even of the seamen themselves; and as the captain passed me, I could hear him softly to himself say, several times, "We shall be all lost!" My horror of mind put me into such a condition that I can by no words describe it. The storm increased, and the seamen every now and then cried out the ship would founder.
"Never at any time in peace have sailors stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a readiness to step again into a ship." Which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. I should like to know at what time of history the English Merchant Service, the great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer the call.
Our ships were good against their ships, our seamen were better than their seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority in aircraft. Our trained men were good against their trained men, but they could not be in several places at once, and the enemy could.
As Mackintosh's courage and determination were well known, the seamen again consulted together, and then asked him what he proposed. "We have one good boat left, the new yawl at the booms: the others, as you know, are washed away, with the exception of the little boat astern, which is useless, as she is knocked almost to pieces.
That the Slave-trade was peculiarly destructive to the seamen employed in it; and that the mortality there had been much greater than in any British vessels employed upon the same coast in any other service or trade.
Fifteen or twenty officers and seamen had just landed and were making their way toward the public house, when they were assailed by a hundred infuriated Marylanders with sticks, clubs, stones, dirt, old tin buckets and almost every conceivable weapon.
I pointed him out to the English seamen; and two of them, springing up, seized the oars from the hands of the Lascars, and by pulling away lustily we got up close to the spot. The man saw us coming. It was not without difficulty that we managed to haul him on board so as to avoid striking him or staving in the boat against the piece of wreck which had kept him up.
It is singular that in the early part of the present century, when Clarkson, Wilberforce, and other philanthropists, with a zeal and perseverance which reflects immortal honor on their names, labored unceasingly and successfully to abolish an important branch of the African slave trade, no voice was raised in the British parliament to abolish the impressment of seamen a system of slavery as odious, unjust and degrading, as was ever established by a despotic government!
With the conservatism common in seamen who have been for long periods separated by their profession from their native places, the great majority of these officers, already men of middle age, could not but feel keen sorrow at the prospect of changes, which would remove them from the navy and separate them from the flag which had hitherto stood to them for country.
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