I use the word ‘oppression.’ It was physical. My spirits were easy. My conscience slept. What had I done that it should rebuke me? I was proving myself faithful to the man I had sworn to be true to, and whom I loved with all the heart which was my life, and with all the soul which was my intelligence. I was offending no father, grieving no mother, and, as to my uncle and aunt, I knew this, that whilst I chose to hold myself betrothed to a convict, it was all one to them whether I followed him in my own fashion or waited at home for his return. By-and-by I thought I would make an experiment, and creeping out of the sail and groping about I touched a tin of preserved meat. In those times provisions were not delicately tinned as they are now. It was a common practice then to seal up whole joints of cooked legs of mutton and roast sirloins of beef in tins. Some of the tins Will had stowed for me with the aid of his corrupted lumper or rigger were of the size of small drums, others were little; these contained a sort of soup, well-known at sea, called soup and bouilli. The first tin I touched was one of them. I opened it easily with the knife, and found the contents solid enough to be removed in wedges. I then felt for a biscuit, and made my first meal. I was obliged to light a candle to seek for the pannikin; I counted fifteen quart bottles of water, one of which I opened, being thirsty. All these things were well hidden within the embrasures of the timbers and by the ropes and other matters which fenced them round about. I groped my way into the sail again after blowing out the candle, always taking care to command as much of the slack of the canvas as would enable me to hide in a moment if the hatch should be lifted. Here now was I, fairly warm, tolerably provided for, suffering from nothing worse--but then to be sure nothing worse in its way could well be imagined--than an overwhelming oppression of silence and a blackness deeper than blindness. How does the ordinary, the average stowaway manage, I remember wondering? He sneaks in his rags into dark, rat-hidden holes, and lingers without food or water for days. Yet it is contrived; the stowaway is the commonest incident of ocean life: sometimes, indeed, he is found a skeleton at the bottom of a chain-locker; but it is the rule with him to emerge ribbed, gaunt, half-nude; he is then set to work, and lands well-lined with ship’s beef and pork to flourish perhaps in a country where he is wanted.