I asked about the captain; but I was told drink made no difference upon that man of iron.
I did my best in the small time allowed me to make some thing like a man, or rather I should say something like a boy, of the poor creature, Ransome.

But his mind was scarce truly human.

He could remember nothing of the time before he came to sea; only that his father had made clocks, and had a starling in the parlour, which could whistle "The North Countrie;" all else had been blotted out in these years of hardship and cruelties.

He had a strange notion of the dry land, picked up from sailor's stories: that it was a place where lads were put to some kind of slavery called a trade, and where apprentices were continually lashed and clapped into foul prisons.

In a town, he thought every second person a decoy, and every third house a place in which seamen would be drugged and murdered.