An honest and frank account of life at sea by a British naval surgeon.
Strang explains that the verse in this book was written “among the scenes they describe, to alleviate the tedium of a sea life, and the languor and despondency of protracted illness”. The title poem is a long invocation of life at sea which begins with proud patriotic claims about the Navy but soon tackles the hardship of being away from home, sickness on long voyages, the dangers of bad weather, the life of retired seamen at Greenwich and the miserable rations onboard ship. One long scene in the poem describes the escape of a black slave from a slave ship:
“One evening calm and sultry, when the cries
Of Negroes from the slave-ships, pierc’d the skies,
When, forc’d to dance, they shook their clanking chains,
And furious yell’d aloud their native strains -
A sudden scream of joy salutes the ear,
Burst from the gloomy ship that floated near;
Freed from this chain a slave o’er-board had leap’d,
And fast his course thro’ the still water kept…“
The scene ends with the slave escaping from the pursuit of his captors to the delight of his fellow slaves and the sailors on Strang’s own ship.
In the same year Strang published an equally frank guide for young doctors considering a life in the armed forces, Letters to a student of medicine on his commencing practice, with a comparison of the conditions of naval, military, and private practitioners (London, 1812).
