'That cook's a very insolent fellow,' said Mr. Owen. 'I hope he will give me the pleasure of prescribing for him.'
'All sea cooks are ill-tempered,' said Mrs. Burke. 'They live in little boxes like that, and are obliged, for want of room, to stand close to furnaces all day long, and their livers swell. But their trials are many. I've heard of a sea striking a galley where the cook was in it full of the business of the cabin dinner, and washing him and his kitchen right aft, where he was rescued out of a depth of water as high as a man's waist holding on for his life to a frying-pan. Cooks ashore never meet with blows of that sort.'
A number of the crew were at work on various jobs in this part of the vessel. Two sat upon a sail, stitching at it. Hard by was a little machine called a spun-yarn winch, merrily clinking, with a boy walking backwards from it as it yielded the line it twisted.
A man with a marline spike stood in the fore-shrouds working at a ratline. I looked at everything I saw with interest and attention; to me it was like the rising of a curtain upon a theatrical show of incomparable beauty and variety; I found novelty in the very men; I don't remember that I had ever seen such men on shore, least of all down by the seaside, where the landsman seeks the sailor and finds him in anything that wears a jersey and owns a boat. They were hairy, burnt, wildly dressed, half-naked some of them; their trousers turned above their knees, their chests bare, mossy, gleaming with perspiration; arrows in Indian ink pointed like weather-cocks upon their muscular naked arms as they moved them, and every man's fist was barbarous with rings in Indian ink and his wrists with blue bracelets.
'Do you see that hole there, Miss Otway?' said Mr. Owen, pointing to a square hatch in the forecastle deck. 'Those men sleep down in that hole,' said he.
I drew close to the queer little trap-door to look down, taking care to hold on to Mrs. Burke; for it was not only that the heave of the ship was to be felt here in her falls and jumps, lofty as the peaks and deep as the valleys which underran her: the trade wind stormed in thunder out of the huge rigid hollow of the fore-course with the weight as of a whole gale in the sweep of it, flying in long, steady shriekings and whistlings under the arched foot, and smiting every heave of brine leaping white above the cathead into crystal smoke.
I gazed into a sort of well, at the bottom of which upon an old green battered sea-chest sat a sailor. The man had a squint that had almost twisted each ball of vision into his nose; he was deeply pitted, and had long, curling, sand-coloured hair and a yellow beard; he was pale and weedy, with but a little piece of nose in the middle of his face, and cheek-bones starting through his skin pale with heat, and when he looked up and continued to stare at us with his desperate squint, he made me guess how drowned sailors look when their bodies are washed ashore. He was a sick man and off duty.
'How are you feeling?' the doctor called down to him.
'Oh, dot I vhas kep' togedder mit red-hot corkscrews,' he answered in a voice that creaked like a sea-gull's note.
'Go on taking your physic,' said Mr. Owen.