"Thank you. And perhaps you'll be so kind as to tell
me what the hell you're doing on my quarter-deck? I
want no dirt of your sort here. Is there nothing for
you to do? Where's the mate? Don't you set me to find
work for you, or I'll find you some that will keep you
on your back a fortnight." Such allocutions, conceived
with a perfect knowledge of his audience, so that every
insult carried home, were delivered with a mien so
menacing, and an eye so fiercely cruel, that his
unhappy subordinates shrank and quailed. Too often
violence followed; too often I have heard and seen and
boiled at the cowardly aggression; and the victim, his
hands bound by law, has risen again from deck and
crawled forward stupefied--I know not what passion of
revenge in his wronged heart.
It seems strange I should have grown to like this
tyrant. It may even seem strange that I should have
stood by and suffered his excesses to proceed. But I
was not quite such a chicken as to interfere in public,
for I would rather have a man or two mishandled than
one half of us butchered in a mutiny and the rest
suffer on the gallows.
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