There is a great deal of talk about "godly captains;" but I never knew one that was not an infernal tyrant, and a most accomplished scoundrel. If you wish to cure a boy of a fondness for the sea, send him a good long voyage with a godly captain, and I'll be bail that he comes home as lean as a weazel, and most thoroughly disgusted at the very thoughts of a ship. If you merely wish to get rid of him, send him to the coast of Guinea on a trading voyage, or to that Golgotha, New Orleans; a godly captain, by working him one half to death, and starving him the other, will put it out of his power to trouble you any more in this world. The Carmelites and other religious orders were once of opinion that the devil could be flogged out of the flesh, and for that purpose wore a couple of fathoms of two-inch rope about their loins: godly captains think he can be worked out, and so, perhaps, he can; but generally, in the two places that I have mentioned, he and the vital spark go out together.
I do not know whether I ought to regard it as a fortunate or unfortunate circumstance, that the first captain that I sailed with was a "ripper" for swearing and drinking. He was a professed infidel, a first-rate seaman, an excellent scholar, and took more care of the morals of his crew than many of those who have prayers twice a day; and ten thousand times more of their health, for he would not permit a man to expose himself for two minutes to the sun or rain in Batavia, and in consequence did not lose a man. He watched over my moral and physical health with a degree of zeal and tenderness that I have never, for an instant, experienced since, at the hands of those who call themselves my "friends." Indeed, the severest scolding he ever gave me, and I expected every moment he would knock me down in the street, was for walking, one deliciously cool morning, from Weltwreden to Batavia, a distance of four miles, when I had a carriage and two horses at my disposal.
Peace to his ashes! I have lived to see the grave close in succession over many of the few friends that I ever had. When I wandered about London streets, barefoot and half-naked, in the dead of a hard winter, just discharged from a hospital, and scarcely able to drag one foot after the other, my situation was comparatively enviable. I had no self-styled "friends" at my elbow, to mock me by talking about my "talents!" I knew that if I did not "bear a hand," and ship myself off _somewhere_, I should be taken up on the vagrant act, and sent to Bridewell. Burns says,