ey at sea, especially in chasing or
being chased, cannot well conceive the shock such a spectacle must
give to a heart capable of the least tincture of commiseration. To
behold ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned meagre
wretches, chained to a plank, from whence they remove not for months
together (commonly half a year), urged on, even beyond human strength,
with cruel and repeated blows on their bare flesh, to an incessant
continuation of the most violent of all exercises; and this for whole
days and nights successively, which often happens in a furious chase,
when one party, like vultures, is hurried on almost as eagerly after
their prey, as is the weaker party hurried away in hopes of preserving
life and liberty."[58]

Sometimes a galley-slave worked as long as twenty years, sometimes for
all his miserable life, at this fearful calling. The poor creatures
were chained so close together in their narrow bench--a sharp cut was
the characteristic of the galley--that they could not sleep at full
length. Sometimes seven men (on French galleys, too, in the last
century), had to live and sleep in a space ten feet by four. The whole
ship was a sea of hopeless faces. And between the two lines of rowers
ran the bridge, and on it stood two boatswains (_comiti_) armed with
long whips, which they laid on to the bare backs of the rowers with
merciless severity. Furttenbach gives a picture of the two boatswains
in grimly humorous verse: how they stand,

Beclad, belaced, betrimmed, with many knots bespick;
Embroidered, padded, tied; all feathers and all flap;
Curly and queued, equipped, curious of hood and cap:

and how they "ever stolidly smite" the crew with the bastinado,

Or give them a backward prod in the naked flesh as they ply,
With the point that pricks like a goad, when "powder and shot" is
the cry;

in order to send the Turks to Davy's wet locker:--

As John of Austria nipped them and riddled them with ball,
As soon as his eyes fell on them, and ducked or slaughtered them all;

and how the boatswain's dreaded whistle shrieked through the ship:--

For they hearken to such a blast through all the swish and sweat,
Through rattle and rumpus and raps, and the kicks and cuffs that they
get,
Through the chatter and tread, and the rudder's wash, and the dismal
clank
Of the shameful chain which forever binds the slave to the bank.

To this may be adde