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Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts, my olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe, which the captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking.
Men sitting doubled up in the upper bunks smoked short pipes, swinging bare brown feet above the heads of those who, sprawling below on sea-chests, listened, smiling stupidly or scornfully. Over the white rims of berths stuck out heads with blinking eyes; but the bodies were lost in the gloom of those places, that resembled narrow niches for coffins in a whitewashed and lighted mortuary.
I was the boy who would have been sent home with a hole through him I the boy who write this and the other boy who would have been broken in half, was one whom I had encountered at the dock-gates, where we had both arrived together, that miserable, mizzly morning, in four-wheeled cabs with our sea-chests on the top, and both in mortal dread and yet somehow hopeful that we should be too late, and that the good ship Burgh Castle had sailed.
The bleached bones of men who had perished at sea and sunk below peeped forth from the arms of some, while others clutched rudders and sea-chests, or the skeleton of some land animal; and most horrible of all, a little mermaid whom they had caught and suffocated.
They have allowed him to go to the attic and rummage in the big sea-chests which, he says, are chockful of treasures like ostrich eggs and lumps of coral and Chinese idols. It seems the Miss Watsons won't have these treasures downstairs as they don't look genteel among the 'new art' ornaments admired in Balmoral. So few people welcome that marauder."
We filled sea-chests, the rubber crowns of a couple of old sou'westers, and dumped water through the slats of the tiers of bunks so that it lodged in the angle between the side of the ship and the deck. While we were at this task Riggs was up in the scuttle, and from time to time we could hear the crackle of flames, and then the hissing of the water as he extinguished the burning planks.
There was a bench on either side of the hut which was lumbered with a confused mass of spars, sails, sou'westers, oil-skin coats and trousers; buoys, sea-chests, rudders, tar-barrels, and telescopes. This hovel belonged jointly to old Jeph and Captain Bluenose. Bax had shared it with them before he was appointed to the command of the "Nancy."
Several casks of pork, and flour, and other provisions, an invaluable iron saucepan with the lid tightly jammed on, as well as two sea-chests, with clothing and numerous useful articles, rewarded their labours. The wide bay they had before seen was reached at last. The extent of fertile ground was smaller than they had supposed, and but few cocoa-nut trees grew on it.
Three of the bunks in the lower tier were occupied two of the occupants lying quiet and still, while the third moved restlessly at intervals, emitting low moans the while and four men, evidently hurt, reclined upon the deck, with their backs propped up against sea-chests.
The room had been arranged like the mess-deck of a war-ship; there were sea-chests and bags ranged trimly round the inner wall; there was a trestle table littered with tin pannikins and plates. The roof was supported by a line of wooden stanchions. There were arm racks round the stanchions, containing muskets, cutlasses, and long, double-barrelled pistols.
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