‘Aye, that’s all very well. But I’m to make one in the boat, remember. I’m very sorry for Butler, and like him greatly, although hang me if I think his prison experience has improved his manners. But I don’t see my way to go down hand in hand with him.’ ‘Hold your tongue!’ I cried. ‘The darling saved your life, and this is your gratitude!’ He got up and walked aft, and stood looking at the gig. I walked to the poop-rail and gazed down at the mass of convicts who filled the decks. Some of them were throwing the remains of the barricades overboard. A considerable group stood near the port gangway, and every one of that gang carried a soldier’s musket, with its bayonet fixed. Some of those fellows had acted as first and second ‘captains’ under the doctor. They were now less noisy in the cuddy; a few in that interior did, indeed, continue to drunkenly shout out choruses. Here and there a felon roamed with lurching steps, and often with a cut face and blood upon him as though from a savage scuffle; but I soon noticed that if this sort of fellows got into the people’s way they were elbowed and kicked without ceremony even to the extent of being thrown headlong. Most of the noisiest and the wounded people were young. In truth, already was I sensible of a change in the bearing of the unhappy men. They stood in bodies watching what was going forward. The first clamorous, brutal transports, the early delirious passions which successful rebellion and the possession of freedom had excited, were sobering. Perhaps they had not met with drink enough yet to make them all the fierce, wild, shouting, exulting demons some of them had been changed into by the cuddy drams. Be this as it may, there was less confusion; the senseless bawling had become rare. On deck, the shouts broke only from the throats of tipsy scoundrels aimlessly issuing out of the cuddy into the quarter-deck throng, where, as I have said, they would be hustled and kicked, and sometimes forced into silence by being knocked down. Mr. Bates, no longer distinguishable from the felons who remained clothed in the convicts’ garb, stood at the gangway, superintending the hoisting and lowering of the long-boat over the side. Some of the convicts worked as though they had been sailors in their day. Close beside the little mass of armed men stood Barney Abram, and near him were five or six convicts, variously attired in plundered clothes. These fellows were, without exception, of the better class of prisoners. Most of them had filled positions of some little trust under the doctor, such as cook and barber, and I guessed that they were among the recognised heads of the risen criminals.