“No,” replied he, evading the subject, “I wanted to see you about shipping some cocoa. I’ve got a good lot ready, and you may as well take it as anybody else.”
“Oh, I see,” rejoined the captain, winking in a confidential way at dad, as if they had some secret between them. “We can talk over the bills of lading and so on, while the youngster has a run round to see what a ship is like, eh?”
“Yes,” said dad; and turning to me he added, “You would like to go over the Josephine, would you not, Tom, now you are on board her?”
“Rather!” I replied, delighted at the idea, but still wondering what the captain had meant about “taking me home.”
There was evidently something on the tapis.
“All right, my hearty, so you shall,” said Captain Miles. “The boatswain will take you round and show you the ropes, while your father and I have a chat about business matters.”
He then called Harry the steward, and directed him to give me in charge of Moggridge the boatswain, with instructions to show me everything that was to be seen alow and aloft in the vessel; whereupon the two of us went out of the cabin together, leaving the captain and dad to have an uninterrupted chat over their cigars.
Moggridge turned out to be the very sailor who had been in charge of the launch which had brought us off to the ship; so, from the fact of his knowing that dad had formerly been in the navy, and that I wished to enter the same glorious service, we were soon on the most confidential terms, the good-natured fellow going out of his way to make me thoroughly acquainted with all the details of the Josephine. He first took me down to the hold, where I saw the hogs-heads of sugar being stowed, the casks being packed as tightly as sardines in a tin box. We then went through the ship fore and aft between the decks, from the forecastle to the steward’s pantry. After this the boatswain completed his tour of instruction by showing me how to climb the rigging into the main-top, telling me the names and uses of all the ropes and spars; so that, by the time he had ended, my head was in a state of bewildered confusion, with shrouds and sheets, halliards and stays, stun’-sail yards and cat-heads, bowsprits, and spanker booms, all so mixed up together that it would have puzzled me to discriminate between any of them and say off-hand which was which!
However, the boatswain and I parted very good friends when he took me back to the cabin on the termination of our inspection of the ship—he promising to teach me how to make a reef-knot and a running-bowline the next time I came on board, and I shaking hands with him as a right good fellow whom I would only be too glad to meet again under any circumstances.
Dad and I stopped with Captain Miles until late in the afternoon; when, the glare of the sun having gone off, we were rowed ashore in the captain’s gig. My friend Moggridge took charge of us, and a crew of hardy sailors made the boat spin ashore at a very different rate of speed to that which the heavy old launch displayed on our trip out to the vessel with the sugar hogs-heads.