Never a speaking-trumpet needed Archie Webber. His stentorian voice could have been heard low and aloft in the wildest weather. One, to hear him shouting thus on deck, would have thought him angry. Not so; anger seldom found comfortable quarters in Webber’s breast.
The Cornishmen are a bold race and a hardy. They were, I am told, originally Celts. As I write, these lines, which I have heard or read somewhere, keep running in my mind—
. . . “And shall Trelawney die?
Then thirty thousand Cornishmen shall know the reason why.”
I haven’t the faintest idea who Trelawney was, or what he had done; but it is pretty evident his plucky countrymen had made up their minds that he should not suffer death.
The mate, then, was a beau-ideal Cornishman, and wasn’t ashamed of it either.
As I have introduced the first mate, I may as well bring the second in front of the footlights. Antonio was not particular as to the nationality of his men or officers, so long as he was convinced they could do their duty, and were sober and obedient to command. So Patrick M‘Koy was an active and merry little Irishman. He was almost too active indeed, and when he went on watch things had to hum. He never lost his temper, except with any man he deemed a lubber, and then he did not confine himself to words. Perhaps on shore he was fond of the old game of Aunt Sally, a wooden image seen at shows, that you shy sticks at, you know, until you smash the short clay pipe in her old mouth.
Anyhow if a lubber—and there weren’t many on board—provoked him, Paddy, as he was called for short, would instantly draw out a wooden belaying-pin, and send it whizzing forward along the deck with such precision that it invariably hit the lubber on his bare foot or ankle, and sent him hopping all over the deck.
“That’ll tache ye, my boy,” he would say; then he would tell off another man to do the duty the lubber couldn’t.
Both mates were favourites with Antonio, but I think Paddy “bore the gree.”
On board the Zingara Pandoo took rank as steward and general factotum. He had a boy under him, however, who did his duty fairly well, despite the fact that he was as fat as a flounder.