“I imagine from what I heard in the office to-day,” Kit said to the Captain one evening, “that they are thinking of sending us next to Marseilles.”
“Yes,” the Captain answered, “they are talking of it, I know. But nothing is settled yet.”
“I hope they will,” Kit went on; “that would give us a fine voyage into the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar. Marseilles must be a little further than London, of course.”
“Yes, it is just about four thousand miles,” the Captain answered. “It would be a good thing for you, for several reasons. The North Cape ought to go into dry-dock to be scraped and painted before crossing the ocean again, for one thing, and that would give you time to go home. For another thing, Marseilles is one of the most interesting places in the world. But our firm won’t take those things into consideration in making up their minds,” he added, laughing.
“What cargo should we probably take if we went to Marseilles, sir?” Kit asked.
“Oil,” the Captain replied; “and as Marseilles is one of the great olive-oil shipping ports, that would be carrying coals to Newcastle with a vengeance, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t quite understand, sir,” Kit answered.
“Well, you will soon see into it,” the Captain said, “if we go to Marseilles. You see they make a great deal of olive-oil all along that part of the Mediterranean coast. And it is shipped from Marseilles. Olive-oil, you understand, is a very expensive product. We make a great deal of cotton-seed oil in this country, and that is a very cheap product. So they buy our cotton-seed oil, and we take it over to them.”
“But you don’t mean that they mix our cotton-seed oil with their olive-oil, and sell it for pure oil, do you, sir?”
“I never saw them mix it,” the Captain said, laughing quietly to himself. “But when you put this and that together, and considering that they have no other use for cotton-seed oil over there, it certainly looks very much like it, doesn’t it?