It was this way on the Port Edes. Forward and aft, engine-hold and pantry, each man on board of her had his private sea-failings. Between them they lacked wakefulness, eyesight, decision, strength of fist, strength of language, seamanship, and common sobriety. Amongst the deck-hands there were virulent sea-lawyers; in the stokeholds there was âmes damnées wanted by several Governments. The engineers were skilful in gaining the smallest possible knottage per ton of coal; the mates were all slipshod navigators, untrustworthy even to correct a compass and useless to drive a truculent crew.
Over all was Owen Kettle, master mariner. Whatever his failings might be (and the index of them tailed out), they did not show prominently at the head of such a ship’s company. Like all men in the merchant marine, he had been bred in the roughest school; but, unlike his successful brethren, he had not graduated later on to the smooth things of a well-manned passenger liner. For his sins he had remained the pitiful knock-about skipper, a man with knife-edged words always ready on the lip of his teeth, a leaden whistle in one jacket-pocket, and a lethal weapon in the other. He was an excellent seaman and navigator—a man capable of going an entire voyage without taking off his clothes or enjoying one watch of regular sleep. Whilst in command at sea, he credited himself with the powers of a Czar, and was entirely unscrupulous in gaining ends which expediency or his owners laid down for him; and though not physically powerful, he had the pluck of a dog, and an unholy reputation for marksmanship. Taking into allowance these qualifications, it may be understood that for the handling of such a menagerie of all-nation scoundreldom and incapacity as bunked in the S. S. Port Edes, no better man than Owen Kettle breathed in either hemisphere.
The crew signed their marks on the articles at the shipping office in the Sailors’ Home, and went off grumbling to get rid of their advances. Later, most of them turned up on the steamer; some with their worldly goods done up in dunnage sacks (which look to the uninitiated like pillow-slips); some apparently possessing nothing but the squalid raiment they stood up in. There was not one of them dressed like a sailor, according to the conventional idea, yet most of them had made their bread upon the seas since early boyhood, which shows what conventional ideas are sometimes worth. They were most of them oldish men, and looked even older than their years.
The engineers came on board early, for the most part in scrubby blue serge, and sour black temper. They grumbled at the mess-room in broad Glaswegian, prophesied evil (in advance) about the capacities of the mess-room steward and the ship’s cook, dumped their belongings into their various rooms, and changed to apparel more suitable for tail-twisting in the unclean regions below. Then they went on duty, quarreled with the donkeyman who was making steam for the winches, and proceeded to split up their crew of firemen and trimmers into watches, and apportion them to furnace doors and bunkers.
The three mates, the boatswain, and the carpenter were also on board betimes, most of them large-headed with recent libations, and feeling cantankerous accordingly. There was a small general cargo being shipped for New Orleans, and it gave these worthy officers ease to find occasional acid fault with the stevedore’s crew or the crane men on the wharf; but, for the most part, they shuffled about the decks in easy slippers, attending to the various ship duties in massive sneering silence.
Patrick Onslow came into the chart-house on the bridge-deck, closing the door behind him. “A cheery, amiable crowd you’ve collected,” he said.
“Aren’t they?” replied Captain Kettle from a sofa locker. “They’re just a terror of a crew. You wait till we get to sea, and they start on mischief. My mate’s a cur; he wouldn’t stand up to a Chinaman. And the rest of the after-guard is much of a pattern—picked that way on purpose. Oh, I tell you, Mr. Onslow, that I stand alone, and I shall have my hands full. But let ’em start, the brutes. I’ll haze them. It isn’t a new sort of tea-party, this, with me.”
“You’re going into it with your eyes open, anyway.”
“Oh don’t you make any error, sir,” said Kettle. “I know my job. And if I warn you, it’s because you’ll see things for yourself, and perhaps join in at them. I don’t go and tell everybody. Not much. They think ashore I’ve got a real soft thing on this time. Why, do you know, Mr. Onslow,” he added, with a thin, sour grin, “my old woman wanted to come with me for the trip. She said it was so long since she’s had a whiff of outside air, that now I’d such a tidy steamboat under me, she couldn’t miss the chance. Yes, sir; and she said she’d bring one of the kids with her that wanted to be a sailor, like his daddy! I tell you, she was that took on the idea she’d hear no refusal; and I had to write a letter to owners, and get them to wire back a ‘No’ she could read for herself. It’d look well set to music, that tale, wouldn’t it? Sort of jumpy music, you know, with a yo-heave-humbug chorus to it, same as all sailors’ songs have that you hear in the halls.”