“He’ll do,” said the master-at-arms. “Carry on, my lad. Look sharp!”
The next instant, back came the boy with one of the instructors in his wake, a stalwart seaman, dressed in the usual bluejacket rig, with a petty officer’s badge.
“These boys here, Mr Saunders,” said the master-at-arms, pointing us out with a collective sweep of his long brawny arm, “are all novices, who came aboard yesterday, and don’t know what to do with themselves till they join the ship’s company. Hadn’t they better pass their ‘bag and hammock’ while waiting for their rig, instead of loafing about here? Mr Gadgett, the bo’sun, was complaining just now of their taking up all the fairway of the deck, and told me I must get rid of them from here somehow or the other!”
“All right,” responded the seaman-instructor to this suggestion of the master-at-arms; and, turning to us, he said, “Take up your hammocks, my lads, and follow me down to the lower deck. You’ll have a practical lesson in seeing how your shipmates do it, lads. We’re just in time!”
We were, barely so; for, as we passed down the hatchway from the middle deck to the lower region he had previously indicated, it was hard work for us to shove by the surging crowd of boys who were hurrying up, each with his hammock neatly made up and lashed in the regulation form, to be stowed in the nettings on top of the bulwarks amidships the upper deck, according to nautical routine.
Some, however, were slower at the work, and, taking stock of these, in obedience to the instructor’s orders, I got a very fair notion of how the thing was done; the more especially, as father had shown me the way he used to lash up his hammock in the old days when he was at sea, by the aid of a biscuit bag and a piece of string.
But our instructor was not satisfied by our now having mere ocular demonstration and doing nothing further; not he. On the contrary, he took us up to make another requisition on the ship’s steward for our regular kit, which was promptly served out to us; and all the morning, after a good breakfast, which made Mick Donovan open his eyes wider than ordinarily and stare like a stockfish, consisting as it did of cold salt pork and bread, with some splendid hot cocoa, that was more like chocolate, and such as he had never tasted before, we were kept hard at it till the ‘assembly’ was bugled out before dinner—going through the details of ‘bag and hammock drill’ seriatim, from the initiatory stage of plaiting the ends of the ‘nettles’ to lashing it up with the specified number of turns.
We new boys returned to Number 52 Mess on the middle deck for dinner, when ‘cooks to their messes’ was sounded.
Our meal this day, it being a Friday, was of a different kind, though quite as substantial as we had experienced on the previous day; a well-piled plate of beef and potatoes being allotted to each of us by the presiding genius of the galley, the sight of which viands made our mouths water.
“Lor’, it ain’t much to holler about!” exclaimed the fastidious Larrikins, on Mick rubbing his hands at seeing those appetising viands; while ‘Ugly’ cried out joyously, on noticing his mealy mass of potatoes, “Them’s the raal jockeys fur I,” thus paraphrasing the remark of a once celebrated millionaire possessed of much lucre but boasting of little conversational power, when at a state banquet, “Why, we only calls this aboard ‘two spuds and a Jonah!’”