"Newcastle, New South Wales, I heard," said Mr. Hollins. "Sixty-five days out, the butcher said; him that came off with the stores this morning."
"Sixty-five, eh! Thirty o' that for a 'dead horse,' an' there'll be about six pound due the men; a matter o' four or five pound wi' slop chest an' that! They'll not stop, Mister, damn the one o' them' ... Ah, there they go; there they go!" Sailors' bags were being loaded into the cat-boats. It was the case of:
The grub was bad, an' th' wages low,
An' it's time—for us—t' leave 'r!
"Good business for us, anyway," said the Old Man, and told the Mate to get his windlass ready for 'heaving up' in the morning.
Alas! he left the other eager shipmasters out of his count. The Captain of the Drumeltan raised the 'blood-money' to an unheard-of sum, and two days later towed out to sea, though the wind was W.S.W. beyond the Straits—a 'dead muzzler'!
A big American ship—the J. B. Flint—was one of the fleet of 'waiters.' She was for China. 'Bully' Nathan was Captain of her (a man who would have made the starkest of pirates, if he had lived in pirate times), and many stories of his and his Mates' brutality were current at the Front. No seaman would sign in the Flint if he had the choice; but the choice lay with the boarding-master when 'Bully' Nathan put up the price.
"Give me gravediggers or organ-grinders, boys, if ye kyan't get sailormen," he was reported to have said. "Anything with two hands an' feet. I guess I'm Jan—K.—Nathan, and they'll be sailormen or 'stiffs' before we reach aout!" No one knew where she got a crew, but while the Britishers were awaiting semi-lawful service, Jan K. slipped out through the night, getting the boarding-house runners to set sail for him before they left the Flint with her crew of drugged longshoremen. At the end of the week we got three more men. Granger, a Liverpool man, who had been working in the Union Ironworks, and, "sick o' th' beach," as he put it, wanted to get back to sea again. Pat Hogan, a merry-faced Irishman, who signed as cook (much to the joy of Houston, who had been the 'food spoiler' since McEwan cleared). The third was a lad, Cutler, a runaway apprentice, who had been working ashore since his ship had sailed. It was said that he had been 'conducting' a tramcar to his own immediate profit and was anxious. We were still six hands short, but, on the morning after a Yankee clipper came in from New York, we towed out—with three prostrate figures lying huddled among the raffle in the fo'cas'le.
We raised the anchor about midnight and dawn found us creeping through the Golden Gate in the wake of a panting tug. There was nothing to see, for the morning mist was over the Straits, and we had no parting view of the harbour. The siren on Benita Point roared a raucous warning as we felt our way past the Head; and that, for us, was the last of the land.
When we reached the schooner and discharged our Pilot, it was still a 'clock calm,' and there was nothing for it but to tow for an offing, while we put the canvas on her in readiness for a breeze.