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The crew had all been sent below, but we soon roused them up, twenty in number; fierce, cut-throat-looking villains most of them were. The between-decks we found crowded with slaves; and we found, when we came to count them, that there were three hundred men, women, and children, so closely packed that they could not lie down even to rest.
Bill, of course, had a very slight idea all the time where they were, for charts and maps were not common between-decks. They had been on board the schooner some ten days or more, when the weather began to cloud over, and just the same appearance came on which Bill remembered before the hurricane they had met with on their passage from England. "What do you think of it?" he asked of old Grim.
It might have been a week after our glimpse of Lord Lovely, that Harry, who had been expecting a letter, which, he told me, might possibly alter his plans, one afternoon came bounding on board the ship, and sprang down the hatchway into the between-decks, where, in perfect solitude, I was engaged picking oakum; at which business the mate had set me, for want of any thing better.
Captain Thompson, instead of giving him the place of a mate off duty, put him into the narrow between-decks, where a space, not over four feet high, had been left out among the hides, and there compelled him to live the whole wearisome voyage, through trades and tropics, and round Cape Horn, with nothing to do, not allowed to converse or walk with the officers, and obliged to get his grub himself from the galley, in the tin pot and kid of a common sailor.
As the day wore on, others were added to them: some, he feared, were cases of malignant fever. They were removed to a part of the ship screened off to serve as an hospital. Nothing else could be done except to fumigate the "between-decks," that operation rather adding to the heat than otherwise. The cabin passengers at length became alarmed.
Besides some old war hulks at the station, there were a couple of training-ships getting ready for a cruise, and it made one proud of his country to see the interest shown by our party in everything on board of them, patiently listening to the explanation of the breech-loading guns, diving down into the between-decks, crowded with the schoolboys, where it is impossible for a man to stand upright and difficult to avoid the stain of paint and tar, or swarming in the cabin, eager to know the mode of the officers' life at sea.
Mr Henley and I, with a strong party, meantime, holding lanterns in our hands, commenced a search round the between-decks and forward, to try and discover the people who had escaped from us. The second-class passengers were all in their berths, and many of them asleep. Mr Barwell was in his, and snoring loudly so loudly, that I could not help fancying it was feigned.
The persons who professed to attend showed no reverence of attitude; and when he endeavoured to make an impression on the soldiers and their wives between-decks, he was met with the same rude and careless inattention.
The sides of the between-decks were clapboarded, the knees and stanchions of iron, and the latter made to unship. The crew said she was as tight as a drum, and a fine sea boat, her only fault being that of most fast ships that she was wet forward. When she was going, as she sometimes would, eight or nine knots on a wind, there would not be a dry spot forward of the gangway.
The between-decks was well enough lighted by a good-sized skylight, and the place that I had got into had fixed tables set in it and seemed to be the mess-room of the crew.
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