While he had benefitted physically through a sea-life, his boyish ideals of the romance and adventure of seafaring had been ruthlessly shattered. His treatment on the Kelvinhaugh had practically killed all the thrilling fancies and dreams of his home days. He was beginning to realize his father’s words, “It’s a dog’s life at the best of times!” and even the blue-skied “trades,” with the barque bowling along through the azure ocean under clouds of brand-new canvas, white as snow, failed to awake in him the same enthusiasm as the ideal about which he had dreamed. True! they were glorious days—for a passenger or the officers, maybe—but for Donald, hard-worked and living on wretched provender and environed by men whose imaginations were dead, the “trade” latitudes were but periods in a voyage, just as summer and winter were seasonal phases in a calendar year. Had he gone to sea under better auspices, his enjoyment of the sea and its glories would have been different.
There was one lesson he did learn and which he ever afterwards retained as a permanent part of his character, and that was dependence upon himself and the submergence of sensitiveness and meek toleration of injustices from equals. The rough talk of the half-deck and the cutting jibes of his shipmates no longer wounded his sensibilities. While he retained his inbred gentleness, yet he case-hardened it with an armor of indifference not to be easily penetrated. Physically, he resented being imposed upon by others not entitled to command obedience, and gained his first step in that resolution in a “show down” with his apprentice watch-mate, Moore.
The surly youth had never forgiven McKenzie for the bunk episode when the ship was at Greenock. He also attempted, by reason of the fact that he had served four days of his time at sea in the lost Dunottar, to claim seniority over Donald and to delegate to the latter the job of “Peggy” for the half-deck. Donald was willing to do his share of fetching the food from the galley and in cleaning out the apprentice’s quarters, but he began to resent doing all of it. Moore considered that Donald’s willingness to do mess-boy work for the crowd was a tacit acknowledgment of his seniority and freedom from such menial tasks, but he over-stepped the bounds one dog-watch when he insolently ordered McKenzie to sweep up the floor of the boys’ quarters, after he had littered it with shavings from a model which he was whittling. Donald had swept the half-deck out earlier in the day, and calmly told Moore that “as you’ve made the mess, it is up to you to clean it up!” Thompson was in his bunk reading, but hearing the words between the two, he knocked off to watch events.
“D’ye hear me, nipper!” growled Moore threateningly. “I told you to clane this litter up. Git now or I’ll be after makin’ ye!”
Donald stood up, determined and very cool. “Moore!” he said calmly, “I’ve made up my mind that I’m a better man than you, so put up your hands, for I’m going to knock the tar out of you!” And he went for the other like a shot out of a gun.
Moore was bigger and heavier than Donald, but he was one of the kind who “sojered” in a heave or a haul and only exerted his strength when he had to. When Donald was toiling under Hinkel’s eye, Moore was “sun-fishing” somewhere. Hinkel was too busy horsing McKenzie to care a continental what Moore was doing, and it was thought by some of the hands that the second mate had received a substantial monetary consideration from the Irish lad to allow him a “jack-easy” time. Moore’s people were wealthy brewers in Liverpool, and he went to sea with plenty of money. However, Mr. Hinkel’s attentions to Donald proved Moore’s undoing. As a physical developer of soft muscles, the second mate had been a success as far as Donald was concerned, and within five minutes, the younger lad had Moore backed up against the bulk-head and was “knocking the tar” out of him with fists as hard and as bony as though shod with knuckle-dusters. Thompson was sitting up in his bunk betting plugs of tobacco on the outcome of the “mill” with Jenkins and the bos’n, who were watching from the door. The sail-maker and carpenter were craning through the ports, thoroughly enjoying the “scrap” and murmuring, “Good fur the wee fella! He’s a richt nippy yin wi’ his dukes!”
Moore, badly mauled, hauled down his flag, and Donald broke away from him. With a new gleam in his eyes—both puffed from some of Moore’s shots—he said, “From now on, Moore, you’ll go half and half in any work that’s to be done in here, and you’ll begin now and do a week’s “Peggy” for what I’ve been doing since we up-hook’d, or I’ll turn to and plug you some more!”
Thompson laughed. “That’s talking, nipper,” he said, “ride him down! You gave that Irish puddler just what he was bearing up for!” And Donald felt that he had gone a step up on the ladder of the spirit that makes the man.