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Updated: June 2, 2025
As an additional measure of safety, prisoners were not allowed on the ground-floor, except that in the daytime they were permitted to use the first floor of the middle section for a cook-room. The interior embraced nine large warehouse-rooms 105 × 45, with eight feet from each floor to ceiling, except the upper floor, which gave more room, owing to the pitch of the gable roof.
These other dark-skinned servants, dawdling along the galleries, or passing here and yonder from the detached quarters of kitchen, and cook-room, and laundry and sleeping-rooms they also humming musically at their work, too full of the sun and the certainty of comfort to need to hurry even with a song all these might also have been tenants of an old-time estate, giving slow service in return for a life of carelessness and irresponsibility.
Nothing further happened till Monday, when excitement was afforded for the younger members of the party at least, as "A maid of Sir Robert Saltonstall fell down at the grating by the cook-room, but the carpenter's man, who unwittingly, occasioned her fall caught hold of her with incredible nimbleness, and saved her; otherwise she had fallen into the hold."
Ha! thought I, sailors see some changes in their time; and with a hearty sigh I stepped into the cook-room. I started, stopped, and fell back a pace with a cry.
Come below at once come Wilkinson, and you men there's a fire in the cook-room and drink to warm us;" and down I bundled in the wildest condition of excitement, followed by Mason and the others. My relative was warmly clad and did not seem to suffer from the cold. He took me by the hand and brought me to the lanthorn-light, and stood viewing me.
But it was all in vain, and had I not come on board, and their own commander and officers with me, and with good words, and some threats also of giving them no more, I believe they would have broke into the cook-room by force, and torn the meat out of the furnace; for words indeed are of a very small force to an hungry belly: however, we pacified them, and fed them gradually and cautiously for the first time, and the next time gave them more, and at last filled their bellies, and the men did well enough.
The end of the cook-room extended back into a grove of trees which surrounded the mansion, and which had given Deck his first suggestion of his method of future operations. Taking the two Hickmans with them, the four went through a window into the grove. The building containing the kitchen concealed them from the view of the ruffians, if any of them went to the windows.
There being nothing more to see, I led them to the cook-room, and there brewed a great hearty bowl of brandy-punch, which I seasoned with lemon, sugar, and spices into as relishable a draught as my knowledge in that way could compass, and, giving every man a pannikin, bade him dip and welcome, myself first drinking to them with a brief speech, yet not so brief but that I broke down towards the close of it, and ended with a dry sob or two.
The first sight I met with in the ship, were two men drowned in the cook-room or forecastle, inclosed in one another's arms: hence I very probably supposed, that when the vessel struck in the storm, so high and incessantly did the waters break in and over her, that the men not being able to bear it, were strangled by the constant rushing in of the waves.
Our surgeon charged the men to cause the meat to be boiled while they stayed, and to keep guard in the cook-room, to prevent the men taking it to eat raw, or taking it out of the pot before it was well boiled, and then to give every man but a very little at a time: and by this caution he preserved the men, who would otherwise have killed themselves with that very food that was given them on purpose to save their lives.
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