The reference to Tom in this conversation had struck me as strange. The men undoubtedly meant Tom when they spoke of one of the convicts as the only sea-captain amongst the prisoners. How should that be known? The doctor was doubtless acquainted with the felons’ antecedents, but he never talked and rarely answered questions. The convicts, then, had made the discovery amongst themselves; this I thought extraordinary. Tom might have admitted his calling to the fellows who shared his sleeping berth, to the prisoners who formed the mess he was in; but how should it be known to two hundred and twenty-nine convicts that the two hundred and thirtieth was the only sea-captain amongst them? Perhaps I mistook; a few had learned Tom’s calling, and one of those few had talked with the sailor whose conversation with his mate I had listened to.
I did not give the matter much thought; I should have given it much less thought had not Tom been the man the sailors referred to. That some of the sailors should have found friends amongst the prisoners was quite in keeping with the looks of a few of the crew. I had often thought that were the forecastle hands to shift clothes with the malefactors, they would make wickeder-looking convicts than the bulk of the prisoners.
SHE IS ALARMED BY WHAT IS SAID BY THE OFFICERS
The convict ship _Childe Harold_ drove steadily down the North Atlantic with the trade-wind, and then, losing those prosperous gales something north of the Equator, crept stealthily through a wide, white, gleaming zone of calms, blurred with fainting catspaws as a mirror is dimmed by the breath. No incident of any sort broke the profound monotony of the routine of shipboard life. Captain Barrett and the subaltern killed the time by firing at a mark with pistols, by cards, chess, deck quoits, fishing for sharks, and the like. Their duties were trifling. The sergeant of the guard seemed to do all the work. The discipline of the sea had the regularity of the tick of a clock. Sights were punctually taken, the log hove, the watch relieved--so it went on. The crew came and went to the sound of Balls’s pipe or to the warning voice of the officer of the watch.
I was now looking very close into the sea life, and was of opinion that it was a sickening, tedious calling. The atmosphere of romance which had coloured my early thoughts of it, got from my father’s and his friends’ merry or wild or exciting yarns, had perished out of my mind long before we were up with the Equator, as the term is. The captain was burdened with enormous responsibilities. The safety of a large, valuable ship freighted with human lives was dependent upon him, and his pay was perhaps less than the wages of a head-waiter of a City tavern. The mates were at the mercy of the captain, who could break them if he chose, send them forward to do common sailor’s work and ruin them. They lived without friendship. One was superior to the other. The captain addressed them only on matters of ship work, and talked familiarly with nobody but the doctor and military officers. There were three mates. Two of them led lives as lonely as the ship’s figure-head; the third, who was a person of no consequence, would carry his pipe into the boatswain’s or apprentices’ berth, and so kill time for himself.