Rough and unkempt both the seamen and officers looked beside our smart, gaily-dressed yachtsmen, but they accorded them a kindly welcome nevertheless. They were invited down below, and found themselves in a little octagon-shaped saloon, with a stove on one side, and doors opening off every other. So small was this crib, as one might call it, that, with the captain and the mate, our friends quite filled it.
The captain was a tall, stout, blustering fellow of about forty years of age, who welcomed them in, roughly but not unkindly, and showered upon them about a dozen questions without waiting for an answer to either. What was the latest from England? Were we at war? Was Hool (Hull) still in the same place? Had they brought newspapers? What would they drink? Ending up with—
“Steward, bring the bottles—confound you! what are you standing grinning there at, like a vixen fox? Sharp’s the word, quick’s the motion.”
There were many words in this sailor’s vocabulary that I do not think it right to repeat, as they were not fit for ears polite.
“What!” he cried, when McBain assured him they neither of them cared to drink—“what, a teetotal ship! Why, how the humpty-dumpty do you manage to keep the cold out, then?”
“Coffee,” was the laconic reply.
“Well, well, well!” said the Greenland captain, filling himself up half a tumblerful of rum, and drinking it off at one gulp. “But sit down all the same, and give us all the news.”
That they would, and that they did, and they answered all his questions with extreme politeness, and were just on the eve of asking him some in return anent his own adventures, when that cry, so musical and exciting to the ear of the Greenland whaler, was shouted from the mast-head, and taken up by those below, and resounded all over the ship from stem to stern, and back again—“A fall! a fall! a fall!”
The captain sprang to his feet, almost capsizing the bottles in his excitement.
“Hurrah, men! hurrah!” he roared, as he sprang up the companion, “luck’s going to turn after all. Hurrah, men! a fall!—yes, a fall in good earnest! Away, boats! Tumble in, lads! tumble in!”