“Huh,” muttered the mate, “I know what I’d do with him if I was in command.”
“Take him on board with you, Dick,” repeated the captain, from above. “Get something to eat now, my man, and report to the chief officer, forward, when you have finished.”
“I’ll send you down a couple of cotton suits,” whispered the steward, before he followed the captain up the ladder; “you’ll die with that outfit on.”
I stayed in the kitchen long enough to eat breakfast, and then hurried forward. The mate, scowling, began asking me question after question as rapidly as he could. Perhaps he wanted to find out whether I had told the truth when I said I had been a sailor.
“Box the compass,” he snarled suddenly.
I did so. For an hour he gave me a severe examination.
“Umph!” he growled at last. “Take that holy-stone with the handle”—it weighed a good thirty pounds—“and go to polishing the poop. You’ll work every day from six in the morning till seven at night, with a half-hour off for your meals. From four to six in the morning, and from eight to ten at night, you’ll keep watch in the crow’s-nest, and save us two natives. On Sunday you’ll keep watch from four to eight, nine to twelve, two to seven, and eight to ten. Look lively now, and see that the poop begins to shine before I get there.”
From that time on, the mate rarely gave me a word. Without a break I toiled at the task he had given me as long as the voyage lasted. The holy-stone took on great weight, but the view I had from the crow’s-nest of every tropical sunrise and sunset I would not have exchanged for a seat at the captain’s table. My mess-mates were good-hearted, and the chief steward was friendly and kind. But the Hindu crew tried to make life unpleasant for me. Few were the moments when a group of the brown rascals were not hovering about me, chattering like apes and grinning impudently. The proudest man on board was the overseer; for it was through him that the mate sent me his orders. Since the days when he rolled naked and unashamed on the sand floor of his native hut, he had dreamed of no greater happiness than the power to give commands to a sahib.
Ten days the Worcestershire steamed on through a motionless sea, under a sun that became more torrid every hour. The kitchen became too hot to live in. Men who had waded through the snow on the docks of Liverpool two weeks before took to sleeping on the deck in the thinnest of clothing. On the eleventh evening we were certain that there was an odor of land in the air. Before morning broke I had climbed again to the crow’s-nest. With the first gray streak of dawn I could see the dim outline of a low mountain range, colored by the gleam of sunrise behind it. Slowly the mountains faded from view as the lowlands beneath them rose up to greet us.
By eight bells we could see a score of naked black-brown islanders paddling boldly seaward in their queer outrigger canoes. The Worcestershire glided past a far-reaching break-water, and, steaming among a school of smaller boats and vessels, rode to an anchorage in the center of the harbor. A crowd swarmed on board, and in the rush and noise I left my stone and hurried below to pack my “shore bundle.” Through the kindness of the chief steward, I was well supplied with cotton suits. I returned to the captain, got his permission to leave, tossed my bundle into the company launch, and, with one English half-penny jingleless in my pocket, set foot on the green island of Ceylon.