crowded straw mattress. I wondered often if my little sisters missed me, and whether they had to go to school now unprotectedâor if they went at all. As for my mother, I ached with longing when I thought of her, and sometimesâquietly, in the darkâI wept.
It was a dark, stuffy, tilting world we boys lived in. Up on deck the business of the ship went on: every officer and man followed his exact ordered routine, and the real sailors, the topmen, the foâcâslemen and the afterguard, clambered up and down the rigging of those towering masts amazingly fast, controlling the sails. The shipâs whole true life was up there. But I was hardly ever free to go up to the fresh air; Mr. Carroll always had some nasty below-decks work for me to do.
I was the boy in Mr. Carrollâs messâthe men all ate their meals in groups of four or six, called messes, and many of them had a boy attached, to do the dirty work. We didjobs like cleaning out the spittoon, the bucket they spat tobacco-juice into. One of their two pleasures was chewing a chunk of solid tobacco, very slowly, spitting out the brown juice from time to time until the tobacco disintegrated and the bits had to be spat out too. The other pleasure was drinking rum, which was issued to every man jack of us twice a dayâhalf a ration for boysâdiluted with water and called grog. You could drink your grog there and then or keep it for a swap. Most of us boys swapped it, though we were also allowed to have money added to our pay instead of being issued grog.
Mr. Carroll was given so many tots of grog in exchange for little treats from the galley that he was nearly always half drunk. He was clever at keeping himself sober at inspection time, when any visibly drunk man would be ordered a dozen lashes, but Stephen and I knew all too well that he would be drunk half an hour afterward, raging at us and at Tommy. Once he broke a big wooden ladle over my back, and once he threw a pot of hot water at Stephen, scalding him so badly that he had to go to the surgeon for the hurt skin to be dressed. Stephen told the surgeon it was an accident. I had argued that he should say what really happened, and he said I was a fool; that the cook would deny it and call him a lying little rogue, which any officer would believe because there would be no proof against it, and then the cook would beat him half to death. He was probably right.
But worse than the cook was one of the midshipmen, Oliver Pickin. HMS Victory had about twenty midshipmen;they were in training to be officers someday, but they had to learn to do everything the sailors did, including climbing to the tops of the masts. Some of them were as young as Stephen and me, some were quite old, but most were young men, wild and rash and looking for anyone they could mistreat in the way that they were often mistreated themselves. Oliver Pickin reminded me of my brother Dick; he was about the same size and just as mean-spirited. The only time I felt sorry for redheaded William Pope was when young Mr. Pickin one day got William a dozen strokes of the cane for failing to salute him. Of course William hadnât saluted him; heâd been staggering along with an armful of hammocks that stopped him from seeing anything, let alone saluting it.
Within four weeks of our sailing from Chatham we were headed south through stormy weather into the Bay of Biscay. We had put in to Portsmouth and Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson had come aboard. I knew by now that Nelson was the hero of the Royal Navy, and of all England too, though back on the farm I had scarcely even known that we were at war with the French. He had won great victories at the Battle of the Nile and at Copenhagen, and lost his right arm and the sight of his right eye in battle, and all the men loved him. When they talked of âthe Admiralâ it was Nelson they meant, even though there were full admirals like Lord Collingwood who held higher rank.
At first,
It was a dark, stuffy, tilting world we boys lived in. Up on deck the business of the ship went on: every officer and man followed his exact ordered routine, and the real sailors, the topmen, the foâcâslemen and the afterguard, clambered up and down the rigging of those towering masts amazingly fast, controlling the sails. The shipâs whole true life was up there. But I was hardly ever free to go up to the fresh air; Mr. Carroll always had some nasty below-decks work for me to do.
I was the boy in Mr. Carrollâs messâthe men all ate their meals in groups of four or six, called messes, and many of them had a boy attached, to do the dirty work. We didjobs like cleaning out the spittoon, the bucket they spat tobacco-juice into. One of their two pleasures was chewing a chunk of solid tobacco, very slowly, spitting out the brown juice from time to time until the tobacco disintegrated and the bits had to be spat out too. The other pleasure was drinking rum, which was issued to every man jack of us twice a dayâhalf a ration for boysâdiluted with water and called grog. You could drink your grog there and then or keep it for a swap. Most of us boys swapped it, though we were also allowed to have money added to our pay instead of being issued grog.
Mr. Carroll was given so many tots of grog in exchange for little treats from the galley that he was nearly always half drunk. He was clever at keeping himself sober at inspection time, when any visibly drunk man would be ordered a dozen lashes, but Stephen and I knew all too well that he would be drunk half an hour afterward, raging at us and at Tommy. Once he broke a big wooden ladle over my back, and once he threw a pot of hot water at Stephen, scalding him so badly that he had to go to the surgeon for the hurt skin to be dressed. Stephen told the surgeon it was an accident. I had argued that he should say what really happened, and he said I was a fool; that the cook would deny it and call him a lying little rogue, which any officer would believe because there would be no proof against it, and then the cook would beat him half to death. He was probably right.
But worse than the cook was one of the midshipmen, Oliver Pickin. HMS Victory had about twenty midshipmen;they were in training to be officers someday, but they had to learn to do everything the sailors did, including climbing to the tops of the masts. Some of them were as young as Stephen and me, some were quite old, but most were young men, wild and rash and looking for anyone they could mistreat in the way that they were often mistreated themselves. Oliver Pickin reminded me of my brother Dick; he was about the same size and just as mean-spirited. The only time I felt sorry for redheaded William Pope was when young Mr. Pickin one day got William a dozen strokes of the cane for failing to salute him. Of course William hadnât saluted him; heâd been staggering along with an armful of hammocks that stopped him from seeing anything, let alone saluting it.
Within four weeks of our sailing from Chatham we were headed south through stormy weather into the Bay of Biscay. We had put in to Portsmouth and Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson had come aboard. I knew by now that Nelson was the hero of the Royal Navy, and of all England too, though back on the farm I had scarcely even known that we were at war with the French. He had won great victories at the Battle of the Nile and at Copenhagen, and lost his right arm and the sight of his right eye in battle, and all the men loved him. When they talked of âthe Admiralâ it was Nelson they meant, even though there were full admirals like Lord Collingwood who held higher rank.
At first,
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