Indeed, my uncle rose many degrees in my respect after I had watched for a time his preparations for our voyage. Simple, rough and uneducated he might be, but a shrewder man at a bargain I have never met in all my experience. And his reputation for honesty was so well established that his credit was practically unlimited among the wholesale grocers and notion jobbers of San Francisco. Everyone seemed ready and anxious to assist him, and the amount of consideration he met with on every hand was really wonderful.
“We’ve bought the right stuff, Sam,” he said to me, as we stood on the deck and watched the shore gradually recede, “and now we’ve got to sell it right. That’s the secret of good tradin’.”
I was glad enough to find myself at sea, where I could rest from my labors of the past two weeks. I had been upon the docks night and day, it seemed, checking off packages of goods as fast as they were loaded on the lighters, and being unaccustomed to work I tired very easily. But my books were all accurate and “ship-shape,” and I had found opportunity to fit up my little state-room with many comforts. In this I had been aided by Uncle Naboth, who was exceedingly liberal in allowing me money for whatever I required. At one time I said I would like to buy a few books, and the next day, to my surprise, he sent to my room a box containing the complete works of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, with a miscellaneous collection of volumes by standard authors.
“I don’t know much about books myself, Sam,” he said; “so I got a feller that does know to pick ’em out for me, an’ I guess you’ll find ’em the right sort.”
I did not tell him that I would have preferred to make my own selection, and afterward I frankly admitted to myself that the collection was an admirable one.
By this time I had come to know all the officers and crew, and found them a pretty good lot, taken altogether. The principal “characters” aboard were the dismal Captain Gay, who was really as contented a man as I ever knew, Acker, the ship’s doctor, and two queer black men called by everybody Nux and Bryonia. Acker was a big, burly Englishman, who, besides being doctor, served as mate. He was jolly and good-natured as the day was long, and had a few good stories which he told over and over again, invariably laughing at them more heartily than his auditors did. Singularly enough, Captain Gay and “Doc” Acker were close friends and cronies, and lived together in perfect harmony.
The black men interested me greatly from the moment I first saw them. Bryonia, or “Bry,” as he was more frequently called, was the cook, and gave perfect satisfaction in that capacity. “Nux” was man-of-all-work, serving the cabin mess, assisting the cook, and acting as “able seaman” whenever required. He proved competent in nearly all ways, and was a prime favorite with officers and men.
They were natives of some small island of the Sulu archipelago, and their history was a strange one. In answer to my question as to why the blacks were so queerly named, Uncle Naboth related the following:
“It were six years ago, or thereabout, as we were homeward bound from our third Australy trip, that we sighted a native canoe in the neighborhood of the Caroline Islands. It was early in the mornin’, and at first the lookout thought the canoe was empty; but it happened to lay in our course, and as we overtook it we saw two niggers lyin’ bound in the bottom of the boat. So we lay to, an’ picked ’em up, an’ when they was histed aboard they were considerable more dead ner alive. Bill Acker was our mate then, as he is now, an’ in his early days he studied to be a hoss doctor. So he always carries a box of medicines with him, to fix up the men in case they gets the jaundice or the colic. Mostly they’s pills, an’ sugar coated, for Doc hates to tackle drugs as is very dangerous. An’ on account of a good deal of sickness among the crew that trip, an’ consequently a good deal of experimentin’ by Doc on the medicine chest, the pills an’ such like was nearly used up, though no one seemed much the worse for it.
“Well, after we’d cut the niggers’ bonds, an’ rubbed ’em good to restore the circulation, we come near decidin’ they was dead an’ heavin’ of ’em overboard agin. But Doc wouldn’t give up. He brought out the medicine box, an’ found that all the stuff he had left was two bottles of pills, one of ’em Nux Vomica, an’ the other Bryonia. I was workin’ over one of the niggers, an’ Doc he hands me one o’ the bottles an says: ‘Nux.’ So I emptied the bottle into the dead man’s mouth, an’ by Jinks, Sam, he come around all right, and is alive an’ kickin’ today. Cap’n Gay dosed the other one with the Bryonia, an’ it fetched him in no time. I won’t swear it were the pills, you know; but the fact is the niggers lived.