He told us that he had managed to empty his pannikin on the deck before putting it to his lips. They had handed him pure rum to drink. Had he swallowed the dose he must have fallen down insensible. The people close to him were too drunk to observe him. He dexterously, whilst seeming to watch Abram, as though to catch his eye to drink his health, poured out the contents of the pannikin, and did not know that the rum had splashed over a man’s face until he looked down. The man, lying like one dead upon the deck, received the discharge without a stir. It seems, however, that Mr. Bates need not have put himself to any trouble to feign drinking. Abram got on to the double chair and began to sing, without taking any notice of the mate. In the midst of his song he stopped to lift a pannikin to his lips, which he emptied, and was then proceeding, when the upper chair gave way and he fell. After the prize-fighter had lain a few moments groaning in sickness, he clawed his way to one of the cabins, and Bates came on deck. Soon after eleven o’clock, a tipsy figure, approaching Tom, stood lurching and backing and filling. The man was a sailor. He asked, with a drunken, broken laugh, if he should take the wheel. ‘Get away to your hammock!’ shouted Tom. ‘We’ll see to the ship. Off you go, and tell the rest of you to turn in till you’ve slept the drink off.’ The man went reeling forward, and in a maudlin voice broke into a song as he worked his way off the poop. But nothing could be done till the silence of drunken sleep was upon the ship. I never could have dreamed that of two hundred and twenty odd convicts, all would have overpowered themselves with liquor. There were grey-haired men and men of education, people who had filled good positions ashore. One, as I have said, was a surgeon, another had been an officer in the army. There were several clerks and young fellows who had been apprenticed to respectable callings. One had been a harbour missionary. No need to lengthen the dismal catalogue. A few, at least, I had thought would have held aloof from the hellish revelries of the cuddy, have come on deck and breathed the fresh night-air and watched the beautiful moonlight after a moderate sup or two from Abram’s and the hare-lipped man’s buckets. Such persons I had looked for, and wondered how we should be able to get away without their hearing or observing us. But, it seems that there was not a convict in the whole living mass of wretches, counting two hundred and thirty souls, less Tom and the fellows that had lost their lives in the morning, who had not entered heart and soul into this hideous merry-making.