To be awakened suddenly from a sound sleep, hurried half-dressed up a gangway, and, ere your faculties have acquired free play, be passed over a ship’s side, on a dark and stormy night, into a boat wildly tossed here and there, with spray showering over you, and a chorus of loud voices about you, is an event not easily forgotten. Such a scene still dwells in my memory, every incident of it as clear and distinct as though it had occurred only yesterday. In this way was I ‘passed,’ with twelve others, on board his Majesty’s frigate, _Téméraire_, a vessel which, in the sea-service, represented what a well-known regiment did on shore, and bore the reputation of being a ‘condemned ship’--this depreciating epithet having no relation to the qualities of the vessel herself, which was a singularly beautiful French model, but only to that of the crew and officers, it being the policy of the day to isolate the blackguards of both services, confining them to particular crafts and corps, making, as it were, a kind of _index expurgatorius_, where all the rascality was available at a moment’s notice. It would be neither agreeable to my reader nor myself, if I should dwell on this theme, nor linger on a description where cruelty, crime, heartless tyranny, and reckless insubordination made up all the elements. A vessel that floated the seas only as a vast penitentiary--the ‘cats,’ the ‘yard-arm,’ and the ‘gangway,’ comprising its scheme of discipline--would scarcely be an agreeable subject. And, in reality, my memory retains of the life aboard little else than scenes of suffering and sorrow. Captain Gesbrook had the name of being able to reduce any, the most insubordinate, to discipline. The veriest rascals of the fleet, the consummate scoundrels, one of whom was deemed pollution to an ordinary crew, were said to come from his hands models of seamanship and good conduct; and it must be owned, that if the character was deserved, it was not obtained without some sacrifice. Many died under punishment; many carried away with them diseases under which they lingered on to death; and not a few preferred suicide to the terrible existence on board. And although a ‘Téméraire’--as a man who had served in her was always afterwards called--was now and then shown as an example of sailorlike smartness and activity, very few knew how dearly that one success had been purchased, nor by what terrible examples of agony and woe that solitary conversion was obtained.