I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer.
He was not only useless as an officer, and a bad influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this rate he must soon kill himself outright; so nobody was much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more. ‘Overboard!’ said the captain. ‘Well, gentlemen, that saves the trouble of putting him in irons.
I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why.
It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart.
I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.
It is a better thing by far that the lad should break his neck, than that you should break his spirit.
Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest –’ And then the whole crew bore chorus: – ‘Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
When we must pass an open place, quickness was not all, but a swift judgment not only of the lie of the whole country, but of the solidity of every stone on which we must set foot; for the afternoon was now fallen so breathless that the rolling of a pebble sounded like a pistol shot, and would start the echo calling among the hills and cliffs.
It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man;.
Sir knight,’ observed the messenger, with bitterness, ’while that ye are here, roaring for five hundred pounds, the realm of England is elsewhere being lost and won.
He is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York.
In the immediate nearness of the gold, all else had been forgotten.
The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort of indignation, as though.
O, man, if you would only take one point of the compass and let me take any other, it would be the best for both of us.
I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.
Avast there! Who are you? Tom Morgan? Maybe you thought you was the Cap’n here, perhaps. By the powers but I’ll teach you better! Cross me and you’ll go where many a good man’s gone before you! First and last! These thirty year back, some to the yard arm, shiver my sides! Some by the board, -and all to feed the fishes. There’s never a man who looked me between th eyes an’ seen a good day a’terwards! Tom Morgan! -You may lay to that.
I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.
Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.
I went down, and drank my fill, and then came up, and got a blink of the moon, and then down again. They say a man sinks a third time for good. I cannot be made like other folk, then; for I would not like to write how often I went down, or how often I came up again. All the while, I was being hurled along, and beaten upon and choked, and then swallowed whole; and the thing was so distracting to my wits, that I was neither sorry nor afraid.
Dreadful stories they were – about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.