"I fights goot that day," he said, when he got his money, and the consul, who is now a magistrate at home, says there wasn't a bruise on him.
THE SCUTTLING OF THE PANDORA.
There are ships with good and evil reputations, independent of the men who own or sail them. Some, it would seem, had their keels laid on a lucky day, others were assuredly—
Built i' th' eclipse and rigged with curses dark.
Many have furrowed all the seas of ocean and have lost no lives, and have cost neither owner nor underwriters money. But some there are (and those who follow the sea will know them) which have never achieved a single passage without being nearly cast away, without killing or maiming men. For such a ship the very shoals themselves decrease in depth through the unlucky set of some abnormal tide: for them the 'trades' spring up far south and die in premature calm ten degrees from the Line. They are well built and highly classed, and yet spring leaks. Derelicts lie in wait for them: they are chased through every sea by cyclones and tornadoes. In them the luck of lucky men is finally of no avail: seamen fall from aloft in calms; the gear gives without notice; stores rot in spite of care. They break the heart of all who have to do with them: in them blood is suddenly spilt: in them strong men waste and die.
Such a ship was the Pandora, and, as she lay off Sandridge, at anchor in Hobson's Bay, there was not a sailorman in Australia who would have shipped in her from choice.
"I've heerd the skipper of one ship I was in talk about the nature of vessels," said Jack Marchmont, as he sat with his mate on the end of the pier, "and he allowed that ships was like men, launched with nat'ral dispositions. He talked a lot of scientific guff about deviation, and what he said was as ships had this or that deviation all according how their heads was p'inted on the stocks. If she p'inted sou-west, she played quite a different game with the compass to what she would have done if she had laid nor'-east. And I believe him. The Pandora must have p'inted straight for hell, Joe."
"She is a bad 'un, I own," said his mate, "but it ain't a matter of ch'ice. Ships is few, and men is plenty, and it's a case of 'John, get up and let Jack sit down' with you and me. If she was a wuss ship than she is, and a wetter (though this ain't a wetter), and if she killed as many as the plague, I ain't goin' to work Tom Cox's traverse ashore any more. And there ain't no beer in the scuttle-butt neither, and Bailey looks at us as black as black. I'm goin' to ship," and Joe Rennet rose.
"I ain't got a farden to jingle of a tombstone," he said.