"The Canal needs men to dig," said Booker, the head of the firm of shippers at Kingston, "it's up to us to get 'em and it's up to you to take 'em to Colon—"
"But I'm not running a slaver, I'm a merchantman, by George, an' you can go to—"
"Hold on, Captain James," broke in the man of affairs, "if you can't run the Enos, a little five hundred ton steamer the way she should be run, it'll be about time for me to look for another skipper."
"But, Mr. Booker, she's as rotten as punk—there ain't a plate in her thicker'n a sheet of blotting paper, an' blame little stronger. She really ain't fit to run passengers even if you bribe the inspectors to let us. I ain't kickin' about the way you've treated me, it ain't that at all, but to ram that ship full o' niggers and send her out is mighty nigh murder, an', that's a fact."
Captain James was a shifty, fat and altogether sodden specimen of the tropical white islander. He had lost a fine vessel, and being unable to get another had drifted about the West Indies handling whatever he could command. Booker, Benson & Co. had found use for him in one of their old ships which had seen her best days running bananas to New Orleans. She had made money, paid for herself ten times over, and now she was just able to stagger along with leaky boilers and scaled plates to the tune of seven knots, heading, as James always thought, for the port of missing ships. Each voyage seemed to be her last, but she somehow drifted in to her port of destination with pumps working and crew mutinous, to discharge and stagger home again. James could not afford to give her up. To do so would have meant ruin for him, and as long as her owners paid him his seventy-five dollars per month—enough to pay for his rum and clothes—he stuck to her with the sullenness of a hungry bulldog gripping a dry bone. How he hated her. He cursed her daily, he swore at her free and fluently whenever she dipped her dull gray sides into the beautiful blue water of the Caribbean at each roll, and when he brought her to her dock, which he did with much care and concern, his exclamations at her perverseness to minding the helm were marvels of linguistic art. His mate, a tall, thin, saturnine Scotchman with bleary eyes from rum and cola, would sometimes deign to look at him with a languid interest during these moments of loud speech, and once—only once—he had allowed himself to be so absorbed in contemplating his master, that he forgot to cast the bowline from the drum of the donkey engine which was winding it in, and by so doing pulled and tore out an iron cleat upon the dock end. Then pandemonium had reigned and the silent mate soon retired to the privacy of his room to still his quaking conscience and steady his shaking nerves with potations of his favourite beverage, rum and cola.
"You will proceed to Boddertown, and then to Georgetown in the Great Cayman, and after seeing Jones there, who will see to clearing you all right, you will run the crowd to Colon, do you understand," said Mr. Booker to his ship-master.
"How many will there be?" asked James sullenly, after finding that his argument was of no avail.
"As many as she will carry—how many do you say, five hundred?"
"Good Lord, Mr. Booker—what? Five hundred niggers in that bit of a ship? Man, think a little."
"She has her ventilators—has both holds well-ventilated, a fruiter is as comfortable below as on deck, has as much ventilation with her blowers as a liner—"