“Why, you thundering liar,” said Garstang, “you stole it out of the ward-room.”
“I wouldn't call no man a liar if I was you, Mister—by G——, that Chinaman cook knows how to make curry.”
He ate like a starving shark, and between mouthfuls kept up a running fire of lies and blasphemy. When he had eaten three platefuls of curry and drunk enough coffee to scald a pig, the skipper, who was gettin' tired of him, asked him if he had had enough.
Yes, he had had enough breakfast to last him a whole (Australian adjective) week.
“Then clear out on deck and swab the curry off your face, you beast!”
“That's always the way with you tradin' skippers. A stranger don't get no civility unless he comes aboard in a (red-painted) gig with a (crimson) umbrella and a (gory) 'elmet 'at, like a (vermilion) Consul.”
The mate seized him, and, running him up the companion way, slung him out on deck.
“What do you think of him?” asked the skipper, a man fond of a joke—it was Bully Hayes. “I thought I'd let you all make his acquaintance. He's been bumming around the Ladrones and Pelews since '50; used to be cook on a Manilla trading brig, the Espiritu Santo.”
Then he told us how this wandering mass of blasphemy got his name of “Spreetoo Santoo.” While in the brig he had been caught smuggling at Guam by the guarda costas, and had spent a year or two in the old prison fort at San Juan de 'Apra. (I don't know how he got out: perhaps his inherently alcoholic breath and lurid blasphemy made the old brick wall tumble down.)