Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery

On inquiry, I found the penalty alluded to in the Wise man's memorial, was nothing less than the delivering of such persons to the most severe of the Useful class, to be kept at hard work, poorly fed, and debarred from intercourse with the pure--in the hope that in process of time, their gross appetites might be scourged out of them. All the horrors of a rice swamp, with but a peck of corn a week for subsistence, sprang up in my affrighted imagination. I immediately set about an elaborate petition to the Best Man, in which I endeavoured to refute the arguments advanced by the Wise man, and to show that my dingy complexion was owing to my seafaring life on the external world, whereby I was much sunburnt; and that the Wise man had been led into error by mistaking a work of imagination, for real history. I admitted that there was a race on the external world, inhabitants of some islands far to the north, who, from their vicinity to the place of exile, might be the descendants of the outcasts, but who, in my opinion, were more probably the descendants of the Belzubians, being a restless, turbulent people, much given to depredations upon the rights and property of others, of insatiable ambition, inordinate avarice, and excessive vanity; who made war their chief occupation, maintaining vast fleets and armies; who plundered the feeble, enslaved the unwary, and levied contributions by force or fraud upon the whole human race: