The Adventures of Roderick Random

Stuck Between Ship Hammocks

In his attempt to assist the sick, the narrator finds himself wedged between hammocks with the weight of multiple patients pressing against his neck. Thompson perceives his predicament and orders one of the waiters to his assistance. With much difficulty, the waiter disengages him from this situation and hinders him from taking vengeance on the sick man, whose indisposition would not have screened him from the effects of the narrator’s indignation.

Steward’s Smell Accusation Defense

After the ministry for the sick concludes, the narrator and Thompson descend to the cockpit. Thompson comforts him with a homely proverb. When they have descended halfway down the ladder, Mr. Morgan, before seeing them, has intelligence by his nose of the approach of something extraordinary. He cries out about the enemy boarding them in a stinkpot and, addressing the steward from whom he imagines the odour proceeds, reprimands him severely for offenses against gentlemen of birth. The steward, conscious of his own innocence, declares he knows of no smells but those of Morgan’s own making.

Morgan Praises Glamorgan Cheese

In the subsequent dialogue, Morgan undertakes to prove that though the stench he complains of does not flow from the steward’s own body, the steward is nevertheless the author of it by serving out damaged provisions to the ship’s company. He particularly blames putrified cheese, affirming that only from the use of such provisions could such unsavoury steams arise. Morgan then launches into the praise of good cheese, giving an analysis of it, explaining the different kinds of that commodity with the methods practiced to make and preserve it, concluding that in yielding good cheese, the county of Glamorgan might vie with Cheshire itself and was much superior to it in the produce of goats and butter.