No flippant remarks here, no joking about the passengers or the company. It was silence and dignity.
How I stood it at first is more of a wonder to me, when I look back at the time, than the actual work, for really a ship's officer is not considered a mighty position, even though he does hold the lives of a couple of thousand folks in his keeping during his watch on deck.
But I was not too old, and had ambition, for some day I wanted to have a little farm of my own and raise chickens and hogs—the true ambition of every seaman I ever met—and I wanted to ask a certain lady to run the said farm for me, or rather do the cooking, which is probably the same thing.
Our crew was shipped by the agents. Old man Hall had nothing whatever to do but act as overseer of the navigators, which same were myself and a second officer named MacFarland.
Mac was a good seaman, although he had never been in sail, but had risen from the apprentice school of officers established by the company to train men for its ships—and they were of course all steam.
I must admit he knew more of express ships than I, but I had ten years more sea duty done, and I was something of a windjammer in my time. This gave me the rating with the older men who had served the same way in the old sailing vessels.
We knew each other, and could depend always upon certain things in each other that no school could develop the same way. I sat at the head of the chief officers' table, and I bought a book of table etiquette to get the lay of the whack just right.
It taught me many things I hadn't learned in a ship's forecastle, and soon I was able to speak to the prosperous-looking passengers without feeling that my tongue was in the way of my teeth.
We carried three hundred first-class—that was some when you think of it—and we often herded fifteen hundred to two thousand in the steerage. Four hundred seconds added sometimes put our total complement over three thousand souls, counting, of course, our crew, stokers, and waiters.
You will realize at once the inability of a chief mate getting even the slightest acquaintance with hundreds of the people who used the Prince George for transportation across the ocean, and, if I could not get a line on them, it was equally impossible for the pursers, pursers' clerks, and stewards to do so.