“She had the most valuable cargo I ever heard of.” A pause.
“Old Shank used to ask for it, though. Once in the Gulf of Mexico he was down below, and the ship was on the course he’d given. (He never used to take any notice of deviation.) The second mate heard breakers, you could hear them quite plain, and not very far off; so he turns the ship a little, and goes down to tell Shank. Old Shank jumped up and stormed and stamped, and rushed up on the bridge roaring, ’Am I to be taught after forty-eight years at sea by a set of b— schoolboys?’ and had her put back to the old course again. And then he walked off. You could hear him snapping his teeth. Presently he stopped. You could see the breakers now, the phosphorescence of them. ’What’s that?’ he whipped out, ’What’s that? My God.’”
“He was one of the white-haired boys in the office, what’s more.”
“His officers saved him.”
“Well, one night he gave me a course, and the last thing he said to me on the bridge was, ‘It’s up to you to keep her there.’ I soon found we were going to fall on land, and I changed the course. And as it was, we passed three-quarters of a mile inside the lightship. I went down to his room and told him. ‘Why, you damn’d fool,’ he started off; he nearly went mad. ‘But I’ve hauled her out,’ I said, ‘I hauled her out.’ And then he yelled, ‘Changed her course without orders, did you?’ and so on.”
“Well, the office made a pet of him. Some people get away with it.”
“After my trip with him, the whole crew refused to sail with him again. And the mate went up to Shields to join a new ship. And when he got there, he found Shank had joined her as skipper!”
We came into the Doldrums, and I felt none too well. “Cold, worse; heat, worse,” became my diary’s keynote. The steward also complained of a persistent cold. Six bottles–six–of his own medicine since we left Barry had not cured him. This notable Cardiff Irishman was always pleased to answer questions about this cold of his, and they became suspiciously frequent. Then his solemn face would grow still more solemn, his voice of office would take on a pleasing melancholy, and he would shake his grey head with dolorous realizations. Nevertheless, his stores being just below my cabin, I grew accustomed to his morning rejuvenate roarings from the threshold at the avarice of the modern sailor. It seemed that at such times he was momentarily free of his illness.
He, nevertheless, at present, added his good word to the general approval of the cook. The bread was universally admired, the pea-soup also. This popularity did not cause any alteration in the melancholy orientalism of its deserver. He looked forth from his galley with the same wooden countenance. He was the thinnest man I think I ever saw.
His macaroni, however, appeared to fall under a general taboo. It was “eschewed.” Bicker, the most assiduous tale-teller, seized it as the chance for describing an old shipmate’s misfortune. It was in Italy: “He was keen on seeing all the sights, so we asked him if he’d seen the macaroni plantation. He said he’d like to. We told him to take the tram out of the town and walk on another mile or so, when he’d see the trees with macaroni growing on them like lace–natural lace. And he went. But the best of it was that he’d sent a card home the day before to say, ‘To-morrow I am going to see the macaroni plantation.’” This, which if true was stranger than fiction, elicited recollections of fool’s-errands in the shipyards (“Run and get a capful of nailholes,” “Ask the storekeeper for a brass hook and a long stay”), which kept us at table until the steward groaned aloud.