- end_line
- 6947
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:14.842Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 6891
- text
- cap and tassel, in standing over the sailors, with his pencil and
memorandum-book in hand.
The crew were a buccaneering looking set; with hairy chests, purple
shirts, and arms wildly tattooed. The mate had a wooden leg, and
hobbled about with a crooked cane like a spiral staircase. There was a
deal of swearing on board of this craft, which was rendered the more
reprehensible when she came to moor alongside the Floating Chapel.
This was the hull of an old sloop-of-war, which had been converted into
a mariner’s church. A house had been built upon it, and a steeple took
the place of a mast. There was a little balcony near the base of the
steeple, some twenty feet from the water; where, on week-days, I used
to see an old pensioner of a tar, sitting on a camp-stool, reading his
Bible. On Sundays he hoisted the Bethel flag, and like the _muezzin_ or
cryer of prayers on the top of a Turkish mosque, would call the
strolling sailors to their devotions; not officially, but on his own
account; conjuring them not to make fools of themselves, but muster
round the pulpit, as they did about the capstan on a man-of-war. This
old worthy was the sexton. I attended the chapel several times, and
found there a very orderly but small congregation. The first time I
went, the chaplain was discoursing on future punishments, and making
allusions to the Tartarean Lake; which, coupled with the pitchy smell
of the old hull, summoned up the most forcible image of the thing which
I ever experienced.
The floating chapels which are to be found in some of the docks, form
one of the means which have been tried to induce the seamen visiting
Liverpool to turn their thoughts toward serious things. But as very few
of them ever think of entering these chapels, though they might pass
them twenty times in the day, some of the clergy, of a Sunday, address
them in the open air, from the corners of the quays, or wherever they
can procure an audience.
Whenever, in my Sunday strolls, I caught sight of one of these
congregations, I always made a point of joining it; and would find
myself surrounded by a motley crowd of seamen from all quarters of the
globe, and women, and lumpers, and dock laborers of all sorts.
Frequently the clergyman would be standing upon an old cask, arrayed in
full canonicals, as a divine of the Church of England. Never have I
heard religious discourses better adapted to an audience of men, who,
like sailors, are chiefly, if not only, to be moved by the plainest of
precepts, and demonstrations of the misery of sin, as conclusive and
undeniable as those of Euclid. No mere rhetoric avails with such men;
fine periods are vanity. You can not touch them with tropes. They need
to be pressed home by plain facts.
And such was generally the mode in which they were addressed by the
clergy in question: who, taking familiar themes for their discourses,
which were leveled right at the wants of their auditors, always
succeeded in fastening their attention. In particular, the two great
vices to which sailors are most addicted, and which they practice to
the ruin of both body and soul; these things, were the most enlarged
upon. And several times on the docks, I have seen a robed clergyman
addressing a large audience of women collected from the notorious lanes
and alleys in the neighborhood.
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