lying asleep along the deck, or riotously
interfering with every body; a company of sappers _en route_ to
Woolwich, who would obey none but their own officer, and he was still
ashore; detachments of able-bodied seamen from the Jupiter, full of grog
and prize-money; four hundred and seventy impressed men, cursing,
blaspheming, and imprecating every species of calamity on their captors;
added to which, a crowd of Jews, bum-boat women, and slop-sellers of all
kinds, with the crews of two ballast-lighters, fighting for additional
pay, being the chief actors in a scene whose discord I never saw
equaled. Drunkenness, suffering, hopeless misery, and even
insubordination, all lent their voices to a tumult, amid which the words
of command seemed lost, and all effort at discipline vain.

How we were ever to go to sea in this state I could not even imagine;
the ship's crew seemed inextricably mingled with the rioters, many of
whom were just sufficiently sober to be eternally meddling with the
ship's tackle; belaying what ought to be "free," and loosening what
should have been "fast;" getting their fingers jammed in blocks, and
their limbs crushed by spars, till the cries of agony rose high above
every other confusion. Turning with disgust from a spectacle so
discordant and disgraceful, I descended the ladders which led, by many a
successive flight, into the dark, low-ceilinged chamber called the "sick
bay," and where poor Santron was lying in, what I almost envied,
insensibility to the scene around him. A severe blow from the hilt of a
cutlass had given him a concussion of the brain, and, save in the
momentary excitement which a sudden question might cause, left him
totally unconscious. His head had been already shaved before I
descended, and I found the assistant-surgeon, an Irishman, Mr. Peter
Colhayne, experimenting a new mode of cupping as I entered. By some
mischance of the machinery, the lancets of the cupping instrument had
remained permanently fixed, refusing to obey the spring, and standing
all straight outside the surface. In this dilemma, Peter's ingenuity saw
nothing for it but to press them down vigorously into the scalp, and
then saw them backward the whole length of the head, a performance, the
originality of which, in all probability, was derived from the operation
of a harrow in agriculture. He had just completed a third track when I
came in, and by great remonstrance and no small flattery induced him to
desist. "