Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the ocean.
There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle head, forward—as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been separated—he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.
But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct personages:
There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of the sheep on the upper deck;
There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;
The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm—made that way from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;
There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of night-watchman, "to break him of his superstitious silliness";
There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty ... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the minute the South Sea King reached an English port, they loved each other so deeply!) ...