And now here he was standing looking down from a hill-top, and wishing himself safe and sound on board one of these stately Greenland ships. But how to get there?
That was the difficulty.
There was no great hurry for a week. He had secured cheap lodgings in a quiet private house, so he must keep still and think fortune might favour him.
The object of the captains of these Greenland whalers in lying for a time at Lerwick is to ship additional hands, for here they can be obtained at a cheaper rate than in Scotland.
All day the streets were crowded to excess with seamen, and at night the place was like a bedlam newly let loose. It was not a pleasant scene to look upon.
Now Harry Milvaine had read so much, that he knew quite a deal about the manners and customs of seafarers, and also of the laws that govern ships, their masters, and their crews.
“If I go straight to the captain of some ship,” he said to himself, “and ask him to take me, then, instead of taking me, he will hand me over to the authorities, and they will send me home. That would not do.”
For a moment, but only a moment, it crossed his mind to become a stowaway.
But there was something most abhorrent in the idea. A mean, sneaking stowaway! Never.
“I’ll do things in a gentlemanly kind of way, whatever happens,” he said to himself.