.

Does anyone ever think nowadays of the horrors that were to be seen
among the fleets not so very long ago? It is not a wonder that any of
the fishers had a glimmer of human feeling in them when they reached
manhood, for no brute beast--not even a cabhorse in an Italian town--was
ever treated as an apprentice on a smack was treated. Some of the
sea-ruffians carried their cruelty to insane extremes, for the lust of
blood seemed to grow upon them. It is a naked truth that there was no
law for boys who lived on the high seas until very recent years. One
fine, hardy seadog (that is the correct and robust way of talking) used
to strip his apprentice, and make him go out to the bowsprit end when
the vessel was dipping her stem in winter time. He was such a merry
fellow, was this bold seadog, and I could make breezy, "robust" Britons
laugh for hours by my narratives of his drolleries. He would not let
this poor boy eat a morsel of anything until he had mixed the dish with
excrements, and when the lad puked at the food the hardy mariner cut his
head open with a belaying-pin or flung him down the hatchway. Sometimes
the hardy one and the mate lashed the apprentice up in the fore-rigging,
and they had rare sport while he squealed under the sting of the knotted
rope's end. On one night the watch on deck saw a figure dart forward and
spring on the rail; the contumacious boy had stripped himself, and he
was barely saved from throwing his skinny, lacerated carcass into the
sea. Shortly after this the youngest apprentice went below, and found
the ill-used lad standing on a locker, and gibbering fearfully. The tiny
boy said:

"Oh! Jim, Jim, what's come to you?" but James never uttered a rational
word more. He was sent to his mother's house at Deptford, and he went to
bed with four other children. In the early morning the youngsters
noticed that Jim seemed rather stiff, and he had exceedingly good
reasons, for he was stone-dead, and doubled up. The coroner's jury
thought that death resulted from a stoppage of the intestines. That was
very funny indeed, for Jim's shipmates observed that as he was bruised
and rope's-ended more and more he lost all power of retaining his food,
and everything he swallowed passed from him undigested. Jim succumbed to
the wholesome, manly, hardening, maritime discipline of the good old
times, and no one was hanged for murdering him.

The mind of the kindly, shoregoing man cannot rightly conceive the
mons