oticed, and gained the upper
deck.

CHAPTER V. THE BARRACOON.

In the prison of the 'tween decks reigned a darkness pregnant with
murmurs. The sentry at the entrance to the hatchway was supposed to
"prevent the prisoners from making a noise," but he put a very liberal
interpretation upon the clause, and so long as the prisoners refrained
from shouting, yelling, and fighting--eccentricities in which they
sometimes indulged--he did not disturb them. This course of conduct was
dictated by prudence, no less than by convenience, for one sentry was
but little over so many; and the convicts, if pressed too hard, would
raise a sort of bestial boo-hoo, in which all voices were confounded,
and which, while it made noise enough and to spare, utterly precluded
individual punishment. One could not flog a hundred and eighty men, and
it was impossible to distinguish any particular offender. So, in
virtue of this last appeal, convictism had established a tacit right to
converse in whispers, and to move about inside its oaken cage.

To one coming in from the upper air, the place would have seemed
in pitchy darkness, but the convict eye, accustomed to the sinister
twilight, was enabled to discern surrounding objects with tolerable
distinctness. The prison was about fifty feet long and fifty feet wide,
and ran the full height of the 'tween decks, viz., about five feet ten
inches high. The barricade was loop-holed here and there, and the planks
were in some places wide enough to admit a musket barrel. On the aft
side, next the soldiers' berths, was a trap door, like the stoke-hole of
a furnace. At first sight this appeared to be contrived for the
humane purpose of ventilation, but a second glance dispelled this weak
conclusion. The opening was just large enough to admit the muzzle of
a small howitzer, secured on the deck below. In case of a mutiny, the
soldiers could sweep the prison from end to end with grape shot. Such
fresh air as there was, filtered through the loopholes, and came, in
somewhat larger quantity, through a wind-sail passed into the prison
from the hatchway. But the wind-sail, being necessarily at one end only
of the place, the air it brought was pretty well absorbed by the twenty
or thirty lucky fellows near it, and the other hundred and fifty did not
come so well off. The scuttles were open, certainly, but as the row of
bunks had been built against them, the air they brought was the peculiar
property of such