Indeed, we had not time even to settle down on board and know each other properly; for each day added to our company, increasing the number of strange faces around us, so that I began to wonder when we would at length get our requisite complement and finish our apparently endless task of fitting out.
“It is a long lane that has no turning,” though, as the old adage goes; and so, after three weeks more of enrolling volunteers at Corporal Macan’s favourite “rendywoo,” and the hoisting in of many guns and boats and stores and provisions of all sorts, until the Candahar, I thought, would never contain them all, we finally bent our sails, crossed royal yards and were declared “ready for sea.”
Captain Farmer came on board with “all his bag and baggage” on our ship’s company “turning over” from the old hulk Blake, to which we all bade a long and welcome adieu, all hands being then mustered by divisions to beat of drum along the upper and lower decks.
We were eight hundred strong, all told; officers and men; bluejackets of all ratings, and marines; boys and “idlers,” as some of the hardest-worked fellows aboard are somewhat inappropriately designated in the watch bill, according to nautical etiquette; as motley a collection at the first start, and yet as fine a set of fellows as you could pick out in a year’s cruise!
These preliminaries being all arranged, we cast off from the hulk late one November afternoon; and, the dockyard tug Puffing Billy taking us in tow, proceeded to Spithead, where we anchored in eleven fathoms, letting out some six shackles of cable, so that we could swing comfortably with the tide as it flowed in and out of the roadstead.
Chapter Eight.
A little Surprise.
“I suppose,” said I, after we had cast anchor, to Larkyns, who had kindly noticed me the first day I came aboard and had been very friendly with me since, patronising me in the way the elder boys of the sixth form sometimes do the younger fellows at school, “we’ll sail to-morrow, eh?”