Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 edition. Excerpt: ... and he is said to have shipped in surprisingly great numbers in the old East Indiaman. Many disgusting insects at sea I am acquainted with, but with none, saving the mosquito, more troublesome and irritating. Our steerage passenger found them in his soup; he found them dotting his portion of pudding as though they were plums; he found them in his boots, and he found them in his night-cap. "The havoc they make," he cries, "is incredible. Cloth, leather, wood, aye, even iron are not invincible to their attacks, and do you know, they will cat off the edge of a razor! I had a beautiful pair spoilt by them." Yet, taking the voyage all round, it was a jolly hearty time the passengers spent upon those grand, broad-bowed, frigatebuilt traders to the east. Here in this " Quid," for instance, I find a long account of the horse-play that was an essential condition of the passage of the equator in that and preceding ages. For my part I think the moder n sailor was well advised in heaving this sort of tomfoolery overboard. It was merry-making of the roughest sort, unfit for the delicate organizations of our current breed of well-fed passengers used to every kind of refinement and luxury that is to be generated by the stress of competition, though it suited well enough the fibres of the race of men in whose eyes the prize fight was a noble performance, to whom cock-fighting was the most engaging of diversions, and who carried the fine art of practical joking to a height unparalleled in the history of society, as you may easily discover for yourself by reading the lives of such men as Barham, the elder Mathews, Theodore Hook, and other rollicking humorists of the period of the Indiamen. Yet undoubtedly one's first...
