“So it is,” said the purser, as they climbed the stairs to a big restaurant where scores of people were eating. “It’s store, restaurant, ice-house, furniture-shop, a dozen things combined. I thought everybody knew the Bridgetown ice-house. Ice is a government monopoly here, you know, and these fellows buy the privilege of selling all that is used on the island. Hello here, Snowflake” (to one of the black waiters; he seemed to know every one in the place), “bring us two platters of your best ice cream; platters, do you hear? Not saucers, or plates, but the biggest platters you have.”
Kit found the ice cream excellent, and the purser a very entertaining companion. He was full of good sea-stories, and knew how to tell them in an interesting way. And he wanted to know all about the young supercargo.
“You’re very young for such a place,” he said; “at your age I was sweeping the cabin and brushing the Captain’s clothes.”
“So was I,” Kit laughed, “until this voyage;” and he had to tell how he became a supercargo, after describing his rescue by Captain Griffith from a Brooklyn policeman.
“Well, you’ll make your way, if you take care of yourself,” Mr. Clark said, after Kit had finished his story and his ice cream together. “Just you let drink alone and don’t get anything into your pockets that belongs to some other fellow. It’s rum that spoils a good many young fellows at sea, and you can’t keep too far away from it. I know appearances are rather against me” (and his fat sides shook again); “they tell me a man with my red face has no business to give temperance lectures; but to tell the truth, I never drink any liquor, though I’ll own up to being fond of good eating. Here, Snowflake, two more platters of ice cream; and don’t stop to warm it.”
Kit soon found that notwithstanding his free-and easy manner and his almost continual laughter, his new companion was a man of great sense and good judgment, thoroughly acquainted with the work of both purser and supercargo.
“I’m glad we ran across each other,” Mr. Clark said, as he shook the young supercargo’s hand. “We’ll meet again sometime, certain sure. Don’t forget me; and remember that when you need a friend you’ll always find one in the purser of the Trinidad.”
That was another of the advantages of being a supercargo; he could make friends and associate with people who would not have paid much attention to a cabin boy. But he had more things to learn before the day was over; for when he returned to the ship he found Captain Griffith preparing to go ashore, and the Captain invited him to go along and meet some of the merchants with whom he would have to do business. They went to the Mercantile Club, where he found the latest English and American newspapers, and news telegrams posted from London and New York, and met some of the principal business men of Bridgetown, and several large sugar planters who went “in to town” in the evenings to hear what was going on in the big outside world. The conversation was all about business and the price of sugar and the state of the crops and the price of freights; and it did not take him long to realize that with his new associations he was no longer a boy, but a young man of affairs who must keep his eyes and ears open and inform himself about a great many things that he had paid no attention to before.
For nearly a week the young supercargo was so busy with getting his cargo ashore and delivered that he had no further chance of seeing the city or the island; but when it came to loading he had more time to himself. The sugar came in slowly, and there were days when there was not enough on the wharf to keep the lighters busy. On such days he had several times to drive out to large plantations to hurry the work, and the planters always treated him with the greatest hospitality. Every night he had some new entry to make in the journal that he began to keep when he became a supercargo—a journal that he refused to call a diary, because he had no intention of writing in it regularly, but only when he had something worth writing. Captain Griffith found the little book lying on his desk one day and wrote on the fly-leaf, “Kit Silburn, His Log”; and after that it was always known as “The Supercargo’s Log.” Some of his entries tell in very few words the story of part of his first long voyage.
“Feb. 12.—Still at Bridgetown, Barbadoes. Took in 146 hogsheads of sugar to-day, with 12 lighters. The sugar is all done up in hogsheads, weighing something over a ton each. It is black-looking stuff as it comes from the mills, and has a sweet, sickish smell. The colored people like to lie on the wharf in the sun and lick up the molasses that leaks out of the casks. We have now 821 hogsheads on board.