While the sergeant was gone, he whispered softly to me, “Lie still; I saw the whole of it, and if you are found out, it may go hard with you.”

Murphy, it appeared, had few friends in the ship; all rejoiced at his accident.  I laid very quietly in my blanket while the surgeon’s assistant dressed the wound; and, after a considerable time, succeeded in restoring the patient to his senses:  he was, however, confined a fortnight to his bed.  I was either not suspected, or, if I was, it was known that I was not the aggressor.  The secret was well kept.  I gave the marine a guinea, and took him into my service as valet de place.

And now, reader, in justice to myself, allow me to make a few remarks.  They may serve as a palliative, to a certain degree, for that unprincipled career which the following pages will expose.  The passions of pride and revenge, implanted in our fallen natures, and which, if not eradicated in the course of my education, ought, at least, to have lain dormant as long as possible, were, through the injudicious conduct of those to whom I had been entrusted, called into action and full activity at a very early age.  The moral seeds sown by my parents, which might have germinated and produced fruit, were not watered or attended to; weeds had usurped their place, and were occupying the ground which should have supported them; and at this period, when the most assiduous cultivation was necessary to procure a return, into what a situation was I thrown?  In a ship crowded with three hundred men, each of them, or nearly so, cohabiting with an unfortunate female, in the lowest state of degradation; where oaths and blasphemy interlarded every sentence; where religion was wholly neglected, and the only honour paid to the Almighty was a clean shirt on a Sunday; where implicit obedience to the will of an officer, was considered of more importance than the observance of the Decalogue; and the Commandments of God were in a manner abrogated by the Articles of War—­for the first might be broken with impunity, and even with applause, while the most severe punishment awaited any infraction of the latter.

So much for the ship in the aggregate; let us now survey the midshipmen’s berth.  Here we found the same language and the same manners, with scarcely one shade more of refinement.  Their only pursuits when on shore were intoxication and worse debauchery, to be gloried in and boasted of when they returned on board.  My captain said that everything found its level in a man-of-war.  True; but in a midshipman’s berth it was the level of a savage, where corporal strength was the sine qua non, and decided whether you were to act the part of a tyrant or a slave.  The discipline of public schools, bad and demoralizing as it is, was light, compared to the tyranny of a midshipman’s berth in 1802.