Life ashore in the early and middle eighteenth century was, in the main, both hard and brutal. Society ashore was made up of a little, brilliant, artificial class, a great, dull, honest, and hardworking mass, and a brutal, dirty, and debased rabble. Society at sea was like society ashore, except that, being composed of men, and confronted with the elements, and based on a grand ceremonial tradition, it was never brilliant, and never artificial. It was, in the main, an honest and hardworking society. Much in it was brutal, dirty, and debased; but it had always behind it an order and a ceremony grand, impressive, and unfaltering. That life in that society was often barbarous and disgusting cannot be doubted. The best men in the ships were taken by force from the merchant service. The others were gathered by press-gangs and gaol-deliveries. They were knocked into shape by brutal methods and kept in hand by brutal punishments. The officers were not always gentlemen; and when they were, they were frequently incompetent. The administration was scandalously corrupt. The ships were unhealthy, the food foul, the pay small, and the treatment cruel. The attractions of the service seem to have been these: the chance of making a large sum of prize-money, and the possibility of getting drunk once a day on the enormous daily ration of intoxicating liquor. The men were crammed together into a dark, stinking, confined space, in which privacy was impossible, peace a dream, and cleanliness a memory. Here they were fed on rotten food, till they died by the score, as this book testifies. "We sent," says Mr. Walter, chaplain in the _Centurion_, "about eighty sick from the _Centurion_; and the other ships, I believe, sent nearly as many, in proportion.... As soon as we had performed this necessary duty, we scraped our decks, and gave our ship a thorough cleaning; then smoked {xii} it between decks, and after all washed every part well with vinegar. These operations were extremely necessary for correcting the noisome stench on board, and destroying the vermin; for ... both these nuisances had increased upon us to a very loathsome degree." "The Biscuit," says Mr. Thomas, the teacher of mathematics in the _Centurion_, "(was) so worm-eaten it was scarce anything but dust, and a little blow would reduce it to that immediately; our Beef and Pork was likewise very rusty and rotten, and the surgeon endeavoured to hinder us from eating any of it, alledging it was, tho' a slow, yet a sure Poison." That tradition and force of will could keep life efficient, and direct it to great ends, in such circumstances, deserves our admiration and our reverence.