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Updated: June 3, 2025
All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers; around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport.
Tony, it appeared, was the master of a small power-schooner which had been fitting out in San Francisco for a filibustering trip to the Mexican coast. His three companions were the crew. None was of the old hearty breed of sailors, but wharf-rats pure and simple, city-dregs whom chance had led to follow the sea.
This last sobriquet he earned as a boy among his fellow wharf-rats, by reason of an extreme lightness of foot attended by an equally noiseless step, particularly noticeable when escaping from some guardian of the peace who had suddenly detected him raiding an apple-stand not his own, or in depleting a heap of peanuts the property of some gentleman of foreign birth, or in making off with a just-emptied ash-barrel Muffles did the emptying on the eve of an election.
The French marines, their scarlet and white very natty in contrast to most of our ragged wharf-rats at the guns, were mustered on poop and forecastle, and some were sent aloft to the tops to assist the tars there to sweep the British decks with handgrenade and musket. And, lastly, the surgeon and his mates went below to cockpit and steerage, to make ready for the grimmest work of all.
When it had gone on for about a week, Matts Wik came too to take part in the fun. There was a crowd in the street, a crowd in the door-way. Sharp elbows and angry tongues were there; street boys and soldiers, maids and scrub-women; peaceable police and stormy rabble. The army was new and the fashion. The well-to-do and the wharf-rats, everybody went to the Salvation Army.
There he closeted himself with two dependable "elbows," started his detectives on a round of the hotels, and himself repaired to the Levee district, where he held off-handed and ponderously facetious conversations with certain unsavory characters. Then came a visit to certain equally unsavory wharf-rats and a call or two on South Rampart Street.
Moreover, it recalled some of the features of another American town, my own dear native place, when I saw the seafaring people leaning against posts, and sitting on planks, under the lee of warehouses, or lolling on long-boats, drawn up high and dry, as sailors and old wharf-rats are accustomed to do, in seaports of little business.
But he seems scarcely to have closed his eyes before he is awakened by a clamour of voices, scolding and laughing in jarring contrast. Rubbing his eyes and looking about him, he sees the cause of the strange disturbance, which proceeds from some ragged boys, of the class commonly termed "wharf-rats" or "mud-larks."
"Thank you; I must go back to my party. I came over to express my personal obligation to you for cleaning out that gang of wharf-rats. My boat anchors off there. I hope to see you aboard her sometime." "You owe me no thanks," returned Banneker good-humoredly. "What I did was to save my own precious skin." "The effect was the same.
But there is a different tale to tell when the tonnage outran the Bluenose ability to man it, and Dutchmen, Dagos, miscellaneous wharf-rats, and 'low-down' Britishers had to be taken on instead. If the crew was mixed and the officers Bluenose there was sure to be trouble of graduated kinds, all the way up from simple knock-downs to the fiercest gun-play of a real hell ship.
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