This part of the Channel was full of shipping, and I know, by the vividness with which my memory reproduces the scene, how beautiful was the picture impressed upon it. All on our right were the English shores, made delicate and even fanciful by distance; here and there fairy-like groups of houses, standing on the heights among trees or embosomed in valleys, with silver sands sloping to the sea: deep shadows staining the purity of the brilliant chalk, and a foreground of pleasure-boats with sails glistening like pearl and bright flags streaming. And to our right and left vessels of different rigs and sizes standing up or down Channel, some running like ourselves, free, with streaming wakes, others coming up close-hauled, some in ballast high out of water, stretching their black sides along the sea and exposing to windward shining surfaces of copper.
At half-past two o'clock in the afternoon, all sail that was required having been made, and the decks cleared, the hands were divided into watches, and I, having charge of the port watch, came on deck. The starboard watch went below; but as the men had not dined, a portion of my own watch joined the others in the forecastle to get their dinner.
I now discovered that the copper-faced man, to whom I have drawn attention, was the new cook. I heard the men bandying jokes with him as they went in and out of the galley, carrying the steaming lumps of pork and reeking dishes of pea-soup into the forecastle, whence I concluded that they had either not yet discovered the quality of the provisions, or that they were more easily satisfied than their predecessors had been.
Among the men in my own watch was the great strapping fellow whom I had likened to a Lifeguardsman. I had thought the man too big to be handy up aloft, but was very much deceived; for in all my life I never witnessed such feats of activity as he performed. His long legs had enabled him to take two ratlines at a time, and he saved himself the trouble of getting over the futtock shrouds by very easily making two steps from the mainshrouds to the mainyard, and from the mainyard to the maintop. I watched him leave the galley, carrying his smoking mess; but I also noticed, before I lost sight of him, that he took a suspiciously long sniff at the steam under his nose, and then violently expectorated.
The breeze was now very lively; the canvas was stretching nobly to it, and the shore all along our starboard beam was a gliding panorama, brilliant with colour and sunshine. They were having dinner in the cuddy, and as often as I passed the skylight I could see the captain glancing upwards at the sails with a well-pleased expression.
I presently noticed the cook's copper face, crowned with an odd kind of knitted cap, protruding from the galley, and his small eyes gazed intently at me. I paced the length of the poop, and when I returned, the cook's head was still at its post, and then his body came out and he stood staring in my direction.
I had to turn abruptly to hide my mirth, for his face was ornamented with an expression of disgust exquisitely comical with the wrinkled nose, the arched thick mouth, and the screwed-up eyebrows.
When I again looked he was coming along the deck, swinging a piece of very fat pork at the end of a string. He advanced close to the poop-ladder at the top of which I was standing, and holding up the pork, said—
"You see dis, sar?"
"Yes," I answered.