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Updated: June 5, 2025
There was much commotion going on around the boat, battening down hatches and doing the last few necessary things before braving the reeling deep. Little Stephen was watching his chance to get aboard. He was going as a stowaway. A man came up to him. It was the captain, and before the lad could escape the man said, "Here, I want a cabin-boy will you go?"
About noon, as we were sitting huddled around the cabin stove, the steamer suddenly stopped. There was a hurried movement of feet overhead a cry and we rushed on deck. One of the sailors was in the act of throwing overboard a life buoy. "It is the Pole!" was our first exclamation. "No, no," said Hildebrand, with a distressed face, "it is the cabin-boy" a sprightly, handsome fellow of fourteen.
The uncomfortable feeling which this incident had aroused was anything but allayed when he heard presently from a little pale cabin-boy with whom he had entered into conversation that it had been successfully concealed from the harbour authorities that there was yellow fever on board; that there were many more lying sick below; and that one of those who had just been heaved overboard, had died the day before in the very berth in which Salvé had slept that night.
The ship was the Don, of the Royal Mail Steamship Company's West Indian line; and nothing could exceed the kindness with which we were treated by every soul on board, from the captain to the stewardess and the junior cabin-boy. Sebastian's great name carried weight even here.
She beckoned to them, and smiled, and wanted to tell them how happy and well off she was; but the cabin-boy approached, and when her sisters dived down he thought it was only the foam of the sea which he saw. The next morning the ship sailed into the harbor of a beautiful town belonging to the king whom the prince was going to visit.
He had been on board only nineteen or twenty hours, and already found it a petty hardship. "If the Roland doesn't make better time," he calculated, "I shall have to go through the same difficulties of existence eight or nine times twenty-four hours. But I will get back to land and remain there, while Pander, the cabin-boy, will have to return across the ocean a few days after landing."
"You're an old navy man, you know, Rowe," I said, "and if you recommended me to the captain of one of these ships for a cabin-boy, I'll be bound they'd take me." "Mr. Charles," said the old man earnestly, "you couldn't go for a cabin-boy, you don't know " "You think I can't rough it," I interrupted impatiently, "but try me, and see.
The skipper stood on the cabin stairs, with his head above the companion. His face was of a somewhat greenish hue, and he frequently ran down into the cabin. The old boatswain believed that he went to look at the chart, the young man thought he drank whisky, but the cabin-boy swore that he went below to vomit.
He had been away for a whole year; and the chief appeared to him shortly afterwards in a dream, revealing himself as no human being, but the chief of the salmon, the divine fish; and he required the man thenceforth to worship him. Curiously similar to the Japanese tale is a tale told to M. Sébillot by a cabin-boy of Saint Cast in Brittany. The promise was royally fulfilled.
How can you want to leave your good home, and all your friends, to live in a ship, exposed to storms and death all the time?" "It is not because I do not love my home and friends; but I have a desire to sail on a voyage to some other country. I like the water, and nothing would suit me better than to be a cabin-boy." "You surprise and pain me, Benjamin. I never dreamed of such a thing.
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