Billings's father was a
mulatto prize-fighter, who perished early from the effects of those
raging excesses in which all men of his class indulged when they came
out of training. The mulatto was as powerful and game a man as ever
stripped in a twenty-four-foot ring; but he ruined his constitution with
alcohol, and he left his children penniless. The little bullet-headed
Jim was drafted off to the workhouse school, and from thence to a small
fishing-smack.
Does anyone ever think nowadays of the horrors that were to be seen
among the fleets not so very long ago? It is not a wonder that any of
the fishers had a glimmer of human feeling in them when they reached
manhood, for no brute beast--not even a cabhorse in an Italian town--was
ever treated as an apprentice on a smack was treated. Some of the
sea-ruffians carried their cruelty to insane extremes, for the lust of
blood seemed to grow upon them. It is a naked truth that there was no
law for boys who lived on the high seas until very recent years.
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