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Updated: May 31, 2025
All that night the carpenters were up making his coffin, for he was to be buried the next day. The body is never allowed to remain many hours unburied in the tropical climates, where putrefaction is so rapid. The following morning the men were up at daylight, washing the decks and putting the ship in order; they worked willingly, and yet with a silent decorum which showed what their feelings were.
Mysterious as this circumstance appears to be, it is not more surprising than that the body of one's fellow-creature, directly after death, and before putrefaction has commenced, should often be of so deleterious a quality, that the mere puncture from an instrument used in its dissection, should prove fatal. 17th. Early in the morning we passed the Nepean in a ferry-boat.
A few days before the massacre, a French sailor, who was working as sail maker, had died of the cholera. His alarmed companions wrapped the body in a sail, and then hurried on board their ships. My Indians now discovered the corpse, which was already in a state of putrefaction. Terrified at first, their terror soon changed to fury; for an instant I feared they would fall upon me.
It may have sunk after being killed; but putrefaction had set in within the carcass and the gases which had thereby formed would keep the whale afloat until the fish and seabirds had stripped its bones, in great part at least. With the returning day the clouds broke. I had noted before arising that the gale was subsiding. The sun showed his face and I welcomed him enthusiastically.
I think I have discovered a cause, which I do not remember to have seen noted; and that cause I suspect to have been, that certain of those authors possessed grace: do not take me for a disciple of Lord Chesterfield, nor imagine that I mean to erect grace into a capital ingredient of writing, but I do believe that it is a perfume that will serve from putrefaction, and is distinct even from style, which regards expression.
The high flavour, or taint in meat, which so many English palates prefer, is in fact the commencement of putrefaction; and of course meat in this state is very improper for food, particularly for persons with any tendency to putrid disorders. At a time when bad fevers prevail, food of this description ought to be generally avoided, as it disposes the blood and juices to receive infection.
Also, I have known slaves taken to the Sick-House, or Hospital, so dreadfully mangled with unmerciful correction as for their wounds to be one mass of putrefaction, and they shortly do give up the Ghost; while, at other times, I have seen unfortunate creatures that had been so lacerated, both back and front, as to be obliged to crawl about on All Fours.
Talking of the Comedy of The Rehearsal, he said, 'It has not wit enough to keep it sweet. This was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence; 'It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction. Though he had no taste for painting, he admired much the manner in which Sir Joshua Reynolds treated of his art, in his Discourses to the Royal Academy.
Science tells us that this abominable form of activity to which Nature is privy is in reality a form of decomposition or putrefaction; but willful men will hardly be restrained by science in their illicit pursuit of frivolity.
And because it was written of the subject that it was to be found wherever men dwell, and that it was a little despised thing which men threw away not realizing its worth, and because they thought of putrefaction as such, they thought to find the real substance in human excrement, and so the school of stercoralists was founded.
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