Systematic and unspeakably inhuman brutality made the merchant
seaman's lot a daily inferno. Traders sailing out of Liverpool,
Bristol and a score of other British ports depended almost entirely
for their crews upon drugged rum, so evil was their reputation in this
respect amongst seafaring men. In the East India Company's ships,
even, the conditions were little short of unendurable. Men had rather
be hanged than sail to the Indies in them. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1463, 1472--Letters of Captains Bouler and Billingsley,
and numerous instances.]

Of all these bitternesses the sailor tasted freely. Cosmopolite that
he was, he wandered far a-sea and incurred the blows and curses of
many masters, happy if, amid his manifold tribulations, he could still
call his soul his own. Just here, indeed, was where the shoe of naval
service pinched him most sorely; for though upon the whole life on
board a man-of-war was not many shades worse than life aboard a
trader, it yet introduced into his already sadly circumscribed vista
of happiness the additional element of absolute loss of free-will, and
the additional dangers of being shot as an enemy or hanged as a
deserter. These additional things, the littles that yet meant so much,
bred in him a hatred of the service so implacable that nothing less
drastic than the warrant and the hanger could cope with or subdue it.
Eradicated it never was.

The keynote to the sailor's treatment in the Navy may be said to have
been profane abuse. Officers of all ranks kept the Recording Angel
fearfully busy. With scarcely an exception they were men of blunt
speech and rough tongue who never hesitated to call a spade a spade,
and the ordinary seaman something many degrees worse. These were
technicalities of the service which had neither use nor meaning