The din in the cuddy was still vile and distracting; but it wanted its former volume. I looked through the skylight and found as much of the table as I could see thick with the stupefied brutes, who, seated, lay upon it from their waists in every sort of drunken posture, most of which not a man amongst them could have put himself into had he been sober. A score and more lay without life or motion on the cabin deck, but numbers were awake, and pannikins of grog were being handed along. The haze of the tobacco smoke hung dark as a river-fog. I walked to the break of the poop and counted some twenty or twenty-five dark figures lying helplessly insensible in various parts of the main- and quarter-deck; men reeled out of the cuddy, as I looked, fell down, with their hands outstretched, and never moved. It was as Tom said: the wretches had not tasted liquor for months, and many of them for years, and now they had been swallowing fiery ship’s rum, I know not how many degrees above proof. (I once, in Mr. Stiles’s time, put my tongue to a ‘neat’ dram or ‘tot,’ as it is called, and was burned as though by a flame.) Numbers, I doubted not, had swallowed the burning poison undiluted. The spectacle of the quarter-deck, above all the sight of the figures lurching out and then dropping as though shot, was sickening and frightful. I went back to Tom. As I passed the skylight, Abram began to sing; but his voice was full of drink, very hideously thick and his delivery tuneless. I was sure, after pausing an instant to listen, that he would soon be amongst those who were laid low. ‘I shall make for that brig,’ said Tom, ‘when we get away.’ I strained my sight, and then barely distinguished the vessel in the obscurity some distance from the edge of the flood of moonshine. ‘It’s a dead calm,’ I said. ‘It matters not,’ he answered. ‘Shouldn’t we first contrive to roll those fellows off the poop?’ said Will at the wheel, meaning the figures upon the deck. ‘It’ll take them all night to sleep off what they’ve got,’ answered Tom. ‘I hope Bates won’t allow them to make him drunk. He’s afraid of Abram.’ ‘Where are the rest who came up with the prize-fighter?’ said I. ‘Gone below for more drink.’ We stood conversing in whispers. Abram’s singing had subdued, but only subdued, the noise in the cabin, yet we could hear one another when we whispered. After twenty minutes, Mr. Bates came up. I regarded him anxiously. His face shone in the moonshine as though he had just lifted his head out of a bucket of oil. ‘The heat below! Oh, the heat below! It’s wonderful they’re not all dead men!’ he exclaimed.