the rascality was available at a moment's notice.

It would be neither agreeable to my reader nor myself, if I should dwell
on this theme, nor linger on a description where cruelty, crime,
heartless tyranny, and reckless insubordination made up all the
elements. A vessel that floated the seas only as a vast
penitentiary--the "cats," the "yard-arm," and the "gangway," comprising
its scheme of discipline--would scarcely be an agreeable subject: and,
in reality, my memory retains of the life aboard little else than scenes
of suffering and sorrow. Captain Gesbrook had the name of being able to
reduce any, the most insubordinate, to discipline. The veriest rascals
of the fleet, the consummate scoundrels, one of whom was deemed
pollution to an ordinary crew, were said to come from his hands models
of seamanship and good conduct; and it must be owned, that if the
character was deserved, it was not obtained without some sacrifice. Many
died under punishment; many carried away with them diseases under which
they lingered on to death; and not a few preferred suicide to the
terrible existence on board. And although a Temeraire--as a man who had
served in her was always afterward called--was now and then shown as an
example of sailorlike smartness and activity, very few knew how dearly
that one success had been purchased, nor by what terrible examples of
agony and woe that solitary conversion was obtained.

To me the short time I spent on board of her is a dreadful dream. We
were bound for the Mediterranean, to touch at Malta and Gibraltar, and
then join the blockading squadron before Genoa. What might have been my
fate, to what excess passionate indignation might have carried me,
revolted as I was by tyranny and injustice, I know not, when an
accident, happily for me, rescued me from all temptation. We lost our
mizen-mast, in a storm, in the Bay of Biscay, and a dreadful blow on
the head, from the spanker-boom, felled me to the deck, with a fracture
of the skull.

From that moment I knew of nothing till the time when I lay in my cot,
beside a port-hole of the main deck, gazing at the bright blue waters
that flashed and rippled beside me, or straining my strength to rest on
my elbow, when I caught sight of the glorious city of Genoa, with its
grand mountain background, about three miles from where I lay. Whether
from a due deference to the imposing strength of the vast fortress, or
that the line of duty described our action, I ca