I Saw Many Poor Fellows Removed To The 'death-Room,' And Saw Them No
More Afterward.
But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than
once.
His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed
in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.
He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and
shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion,
his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment
into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and
he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, HUMP
yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be
all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this
explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which
nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then
while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the
cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was bad
for the others, of course - this noise and these exhibitions; so the
doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind or
out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by
that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He
suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines
and in his water - so he ceased from putting either to his lips.
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