"Yes; you know what I mean."
"Cold water that gurgles from the rock, drunk out of your hand or a vine-leaf."
"Bah! Father Adam's scuttle-butt would never do for me; but may I go to sea with a parson's warrant, if we don't find something better than that here."
"How? I should be glad to find something stronger."
"There must be some toddy-trees on this island. I'm cold as an iceberg in Baffin's Bay; but how'soever, I can, blow a cloud of 'bacca."
Revolting as the companionship of this wretch proved, in some respects I was thankful, truly thankful for it in my solitude, and almost forgot the revelations of crime I had overheard when with him in the Sandridge beacon.
"Now, what have you got to eat here?" he asked.
"Yams, cocoanuts, tortoises, and shell-fish."
"What! not a devilled drumstick, peppered and done to a turn—a grilled kidney—cold fowl and sliced ham? No jolly salt junk, so hard and pickled that it might polish like Honduras mahogany? Excuse me, mister—never mind, you're no officer here, you know, so we shall get on as merrily as two Chatham Jews on a pay-day. I was once shipwrecked among the tattooed devils in the Marquesas islands, when on a voyage in the Southern Pacific. A regular Irish hurricane capsized the ship, and down she went to old Davy with all hands on board—all, at least, save myself and five others, who got ashore in the jolly-boat. Men eat their wives in the Marquesas occasionally; it is a matrimonial privilege, and rather economical. I lived with a fellow who more than once offered me a broiled rasher off his squaw, and very well it smelt, I can tell you, when broiled at the end of an old boat-hook, well seasoned with pimento, and spread, sandwich fashion, on a slice of the bread-fruit."
Knuckleduster concluded his reminiscence by a torrent of forcible invectives on the captain who had marooned him.