“To Callao, Peru,” he answered, “come down to-morrow morning at seven a.m., and you can start work at once. As far as I can see there are none but foreigners to be got in the port at present, if the captain has to engage a crew of foreigners, I will let you live with the carpenter, sailmaker, and cook in the half-deck.”
I thanked him, and promised to be on board at seven on the following morning, and made up my mind that if a crimp, or anyone tried to stop me from doing this, well, it would not be well for either of them.
Leaving the dock, I walked towards the Sailor’s Home where the strikers were congregated, to see if I could pick up any news. Here I found the real strikers were mostly foreigners, and many of them could not speak a word of English. There were Scandinavians, Greeks, Turks, Spaniards, Italians, French, and some Manilla men, the Scandinavians predominating. What a parody! The papers described the dispute as a strike of British seamen, the prime movers of the strike were boarding-house keepers and crimps, for reasons best known to themselves.
Several shipmasters, to save time and trouble, had engaged these same crimps to procure them a crew and bring them on board the morning of sailing and they would get a shipping clerk to sign them on on board the vessel. This was done by the captain of the “Stormy Petrel” and on the following day the boarding master brought as truly a cosmopolitan crowd of men on board, with their bags and baggage, as it has ever been my lot to see. A clerk from the shipping office attended with them to sign them on the ship’s articles, several of them could not speak a word of English. Our crew, therefore, consisted of the captain, the two mates and myself, British; carpenter, sailmaker, and cook, Scandinavians; two Frenchmen, two Spaniards, two Italians, one Greek, two negroes, three Turks, and one Manilla man. I signed on as an ordinary seaman, at two pounds a month.
The “Stormy Petrel” was, as the chief mate told me, bound for Callao, Peru. I had a particular desire to go to Peru at that time, having a relative out there whom I was very anxious to see. He had left Liverpool some fifteen years previously as engineer of the s.s. “Bogota,” of the Pacific Navigation Company and had found very profitable employment at Lima, and like many others, had forgotten the claims of those he had left behind.
We sailed from Liverpool on the Saturday morning. It was a miserably cold raw morning, and the sleet was falling fast. As the chief mate said, it was a day to drive a man to drink, or suicide, enough to make one leave the country in disgust, and seek one that had a climate, and not a bundle of samples.
Our crew, being foreigners, were sober, and that was something to be thankful for, although six of them could not speak one word of English, but, unlike Englishmen, they are remarkably quick at picking up a language. Under these conditions, Captain Glasson deemed it prudent to tow down until abreast of Tusker, in the meantime getting everything secure about the deck.
The river was teeming with life—there were barges and wherries, dark-sailed colliers, swarming along under full sail, ships in tow like ourselves, bound either up or down, huge metal ships gliding to their homes in the docks after days of strenuous passage through the great ocean or floating majestically past us to the far west or east.
Everything being now made snug and secure, the men were told to go and have a smoke, and in a little while all hands were called aft on the quarter deck to pick for watches. For the benefit of those who do not know, I may say that it is the custom for the master to take the ship out to her destination and the chief mate to bring her home, and as the second mate keeps the captain’s watch, he always has first pick. The men were ranged in line across the quarter deck, and the second mate, Mr. Ross, called George the Greek first, and the first mate, Mr. Menzies, called a big Frenchman, and so on alternately until the watches were completed. I was again in the starboard watch, the carpenter, cook and steward always slept in, unless in cases of emergency when it was “all hands on deck.”
The two Frenchmen, Old George the Greek and the two negroes turned out to be thorough good seamen, but the others turned out to be duffers—and disagreeable duffers at that.