The Last Voyage of Martin Vallance by John Arthur Barry

Stepping on to the brig's deck, I looked around with not a little curiosity--after making quite sure that the tiger was dead. Almost the first thing to catch my eye was a great heap of oakum, old canvas, all well tarred and half consumed, lying on the main hatch, between a big pair of wooden chocks, evidently formed for the reception of just such a boat as lay alongside. The fire had burnt through the tarpaulins and charred the hatches but had been extinguished before doing further damage--a very narrow squeak though. Close to the forward end of the hatch was a little galley; farther along, a good-sized deck house, painted white; and the after-ends of both these structures were fairly riddled with bullet-holes. And everywhere about the deck lay scattered bodies--fragments of human skulls, vertebrae, arms, and thighs, many of them crunched and broken, but all clean picked and dried by the hot sun. Still, the planking thereabouts looked like the floor of a slaughter house, and the smell was an equal proportion of dissecting room and menagerie combined.

There was no poop to the brig. The space was taken up by a house running right aft to the wheel, with a narrow alley-way on each side between it and the bulwarks. A handsome brass railing ran round the top of this sort of poop, to which there was no entrance from the quarter deck. But I noticed a couple of small windows in its front with the glass in them smashed. Houses and fittings were immensely strong and built with great solidity. Heavy semicircular double doors, fronting the wheel and binnacle, gave access by a few steps to the cabin; and these doors had been secured by a kedge anchor and a couple of spare chain topsail-sheets in such a fashion that, opening outwards as they did, it would be an utter impossibility for any one within to move them. Indeed, it was fully a quarter of an hour before I was able to open them myself. But at last I flung them wide and pushed back the hood of the companion, and stepped aside, waiting with some curiosity the appearance of the prisoners.