Good advice from Billy Russell

I’ve written about it at length elsewhere – the fearful havoc of embarking, with ships full of spewing soldiers rocking at anchor for days on end, the weeping women who were ordered to stay behind (although my little pal, Fan Duberly, sneaked aboard disguised as a washerwoman), the horses fighting and smashing in their cramped stalls, the hideous stink, the cholera corpses floating in the bay, Billy Russell standing on the quay with his note-book damning Lord Lucan’s eyes – ‘I have my duty, too my lord, which is to inform my readers, and if you don’t like what you’re doing being reported, why then, don’t do it! And that’s my advice to you!’ Of course he was daft and Irish, was Billy, but so was Lucan, and they stood and cussed each other like Mississippi pilots.

Flashman at the Charge, p.59, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Human trade

With our second mate dead and our third apparently dying, I found myself having to work for a living. Even with men who knew their business as well as these, it’s no easy matter to pack six hundred terrified, stupid niggers* into a slave deck; it’s worse than putting Irish infantry into a troopship.

Flash For Freedom!, p.86, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

*Flashman's use of racial epitahs is a continuing problem for more enlightened, contemporary readers. The inclusion of these passages should not be taken as tacit support of his misanthropic, 19th century view of race relations.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.