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Updated: June 23, 2025
"'Nother invalid, ses he; 'fust mate's gone stark, staring mad! "'Mad? ses I. "'Yes, ses he. 'He's got a big basin in the galley, an' he's laughing like a hyener an' mixing bilge-water an' ink, an' paraffin an' butter an' soap an' all sorts o' things up together. The smell's enough to kill a man; I've had to come away.
Not a bit like the Hall, though there's plenty o' beef here for dinner, but it's main tough, and the bread for all the world's like old tiles." "Be thankful you haven't to live on grind-stones and marlin-spikes, as I once had for a whole month, with nothing but bilge-water to wash 'em down," growled out the boatswain, who heard the observation.
It was only forty miles to Al Hafa, but, owing to adverse winds, it took us exactly two days to perform this voyage, and our boat was one of the dirtiest of the kind we have ever travelled on. In our little cabin in the stern the smell of bilge-water was almost overpowering, and every silver thing we had about us turned black with the sulphureous vapours.
Indeed, so much was he taken up with this pump, that he could not be prevailed on to return on shore, but sent a canoe to fetch his favourite stool, on which he seated himself, and spent the remainder of the day in pumping the bilge-water out of the ship!
Now, too, the horrible stench of riled bilge-water floated over all compared to which an aged egg is a bouquet of roses. At eight o'clock that morning they rounded Cape Sable at the tip of Nova Scotia, and laid a course a trifle west of north for the final beat home. There was a hundred miles to go, and Burns still held his three-mile lead.
Captain Grimes, her commander, notwithstanding this, was proud of the old craft; and he especially delighted to tell how she had once carried a pennant when conveying troops to Corunna, or some other port in Spain. I pitied the poor fellows confined to the narrow limits of her dark hold, redolent of bilge-water and other foul odours.
I thought that I could then infinitely better have endured my confinement. Fortunately for me, the ship must have been well cleaned out before the cargo was taken on board; and as she was as tight as a bottle, there was no bilge-water in her. Had there been, I could not have existed so long far down in the depths of her hold.
The life of the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the hideous stench of the bilge-water all this could in one sense be no worse than his sufferings in jail.
Down near the foot of Jackson Street, where the smell of bilge-water and the wash of the sewers grew stronger, and the masts of vessels could just be seen in the darkness outlined against the sky, Dicky suddenly stopped and drew me into a doorway. Our retainer disappeared at the same instant, and the street was apparently deserted.
Angel Todd, first mate and quartermaster, filled a black pipe before answering. Then, between the first and second deep puffs, he said: "Growlin' dammum." "At the work?" "Yep, and the grub. And they say the 'tween-deck and forecastle smells o' bedbugs and bilge-water, and they want their grog. 'An ungodly witness scorneth judgment: and the mouth of the wicked devoureth iniquity." Mr.
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