“Mr Lloyd,” said Claude to his first mate, the morning after the Icebear sailed away from the Orkneys on the wings of a favouring breeze, “I am not going to call my men together and make a speech. That style of thing is far too stagey. We have picked our crew, and I believe they will be good men and true, every one of them. Well, I will try to be a kind and considerate captain; and I’ll tell you now what I should like. I want, then, in a word, all the discipline and cleanliness of a man-o’-war, with a good deal of the cheerfulness and light-heartedness you find on a well-appointed yacht or best class of merchantmen. Let them sing below if they like, or even on deck for’ard during smoking hours: I won’t object to a little music. You understand?”
“Perfectly, my lord.”
Claude held up a finger.
“My lord is too formal for a ship’s quarter-deck,” he said.
“Beg pardon, sir. I really had forgotten for the moment.”
The captain and mate were on the quarter-deck, the latter taking his orders for the day.
As shrewd and sturdy a sailor as ever faced the billows was Lloyd. And not only a sailor, but a thorough iceman. He had been going “back and fore,” as he phrased it, to Greenland ever since he was a boy of ten, and he was now nearly thirty. He had come through every peril that one can think of; he had been cast away as often as he had fingers on his left hand—there were only four, one had been shot off—his ship had been burned at sea, and he had drifted for weeks on an iceberg, with nothing to eat at last except boot leather; he had once even been dragged under water by a shark, and was saved by his sea-boot coming off—one of the best pairs of boots he ever had, he used to tell his mates;—but, for all the dangers he had come through, he dearly loved the regions round the Pole.
“Greenland has been like a mother to me,” he had been heard to say; “and I hope to die there, and be frozen up in an iceberg, where I’ll keep fresh till the crack of doom.” (Note 1.)
That first day at sea—for these hardy mariners had not considered themselves afloat till now—was a very busy one. It was a very beautiful one too, for the matter of that, when one had time to look around him.