cover that Royal a Hutch must be the Rio de la Hacha, that Potty Guavaus stands for Petit Goave, and that a Bark of Longer means a barcalongaa longboat. Kelly is, we feel, veridical, but he is dull. He saw no romance in his own life, but goes on recording in malapropian phrase how he passed from this ship to that, from starvation to temporary abundance, and back again. A dull glow of anger seems to rise in him as he tells how the pirate craft he was in at the time and her consort were surprised on the coast of Jamaica by an armed vessel which sailed against on Sunday morning. It was not usual, says Kelly. He is quite destitute of any sense of the fun of the position when he tells how he and some English messmates were reduced to serve in a French pirate, and how they freed themselves from this degrading subjection. They were at anchor in the West Indies, and the Frenchmen made themselves a bowl of punch in the main hatch, while the Englishmen brewed their bowl at the binnacle. So these ill-assorted comrades sat and watched one another till the English, seeing the French off their guard, seized their arms, turned them out of the vessel, out the cable "at the horse," and so marooned their late friends. There was no honour among those thieves. When Kelly, having wandered all his ways, which took him as far as Sumatra, came to stand in the dock of the Old Bailey, he would have saved his life if lying could have done it; but "justice taking place,' as he honestly words it, he was condemned, and he made his confession with the sobering certainty that the next day had been fixed for his execution. Justice undoubtedly took place on the 12th of July 1700. DAVID HANNAY. A MAN'S MAN. BY IAN HAY, AUTHOR OF THE RIGHT STUFF.' CHAPTER SEVEN. THE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE. HER most ardent admirers and they had never been very numerous could hardly have described the Orinoco 88 a rapid or up-to-date vessel. She could average a fair eight knots in ordinary weather (except when the Chief Engineer was not sober; and then she had been known to do as much as eleven), and she had faced with tolerable credit seven strenuous years of North Atlantic weather, winter and summer alike. But she was no flier. capacity, with a different coloured funnel and a slightly decayed interior, she had served for nine years as the Annie S. Holmes. After that an officious gentleman from the Board of Trade happened to notice the state of her boilers, and unhesitatingly declined to renew her charter until various things were done which her present owner was not in the habit of doing. Consequently she had lain rusting in Southampton Water for six months, until an astute Scot, who ran a sort of Dr Barnardo's Home for steamers which had been abandoned by their original owners, stepped in and bought her, at the rate of about a pound per ton; and having refitted her with some convenient boilers which he had picked up at a sale, and checked her fuel consumption by reducing her grate-area, set her going again in a humble but remunerative way as a pig boat between Limerick and Glasgow. During this period of her career she was known as the Blush Rose-and probably smelt as sweet. She had not always ploughed the ocean at the behests of Mr Noddy Kinahan, her present owner. As a matter of fact, she dated back to the early sixties. She had been built on the Clyde, in days when people were not in such hurry as they are now, for now, for steady and reliable cross-channel service between Scotland and Ireland; and the crinolined young lady who had blushingly performed the christening ceremony as the brand-new steamer slipped down the ways had named her the Gareloch. After fifteen years of honest buffeting between the Kish and the Cloch the little Gareloch had been pronounced too slow, and sold to the proprietor of a line of coasting steamers which plied between Cardiff and London. In this & The maritime Dr Barnardo sold her three years later (at a profit) to a gentleman who required a ship for some shady and mysterious operations amid certain islands in the Southern Pacific. The nature of the Jedburgh Abbey, with a new poor Blush Rose's occupation propeller, she had gone short may be gathered from the of a blade for years, her fact that in the space of rusty carcase tinkered into three months she made those something like sea-worthiness, already tropical regions too and her engines secured a hot to hold her; and, with little more firmly to their her name painted out, a re- bed-plates, had re-established paired shot-hole in her counter, her social status by creeping and a few pearl oyster-shells once more into Lloyd's liststicking out here and there the Red Book of the Mercantile in the murky recesses of her Marine-and, disguised as the hold, was knocked down for Orinoco, of the "River" Line a song at Buenos Ayres to a of freight-carrying steamships, Spanish-American who desired had served Mr Noddy Kinahan her for the fulfilment of some well for seven years. This rather private contracts, into grey morning, with Sandy which he had entered with a Hook well down below the Central American State, for a western horizon, she clambered consignment of small arms and wearily but perseveringly over ammunition delivered immedi- the Atlantic rollers, like a disately terms, C.O.D. and no illusioned and world-weary old questions asked. Her captain cab-horse, which, having begun on this occasion was a Lowland life between the shafts of a Scot of disreputable character gentleman's brougham, is now but inherent piety, who en- concluding a depressing existdeavoured to confer a rather ence by dragging a funereal spurious sanctity upon a ne- growler" up and down the farious enterprise by christen- undulations of а London ing his nameless vessel the suburb. Jedburgh Abbey. But, alas! the Jedburgh Abbey was confiscated a year later by the United States Government, and having disgorged a most uncanonical cargo, was knocked down by Dutch auction, without benefit of Clergy, to the highest bidder. Competition for her possession was not keen, and she ultimately became the property of Mr Noddy Kinahan, who at that time was beginning to pile up a considerable fortune by purchasing old steamers on their way to the scrap-heap and running them as trampfreighters until they sank. The Her redeeming feature was a certain purity of outline and symmetry of form. She boasted a flush deck, unbroken by any unsightly waist amidshps; and not even her unscraped masts, her scarred sides, and her flaked and salt-whitened funnel could altogether take away from her her pride of race, the right to boast, in common with many a human derelict of the same sex and a very similar history, that she had "been a lady once." She had now been at sea for well over twenty-four hours, and her crew, who had to a man been brought on board in what a sympathetic eyewitness Noddy Kinahan made the Captain Kingdom had just appeared upon the bridge. He was a furtive and sinisterlooking individual, resembling rather a pawnbroker's assistant than one who occupied his business in great waters. But he was a useful servant to Noddy Kinahan, "Got all the hands to work, Mr Gates?" he called down to the mate. "Aye, aye, sir!" replied Mr Gates, knocking the heel of his boot on the deck to ease his aching toes. The captain ran his eye over the crew, who were huddling together forward of the bridge. He cleared his throat. "Now, you scum," he began genially, "attend to me, while I tell you what you've got to do on board this ship." The crew consisted of two Englishmen and a Californian, together with a handful of Scandinavians, Portuguese, and Germans, divided by sea-law (which, like its big brother, non curat de minimis) into "Dagoes" and "Dutchmen" respectively, representatives of the Romance races being grouped under the former and of the Anglo-Saxon under the latter designations. With one exception none of them had sailed upon the ship before, and in all probability would never do so again. They had been purveyed to Captain Kingdom by a Tenderloin boardinghouse keeper, and had signed a contract for the voyage to Bordeaux and back, wages for both trips to be paid at the end of the second. If sufficiently knocked about they would in all probability desert at Bordeaux, preferring to forego their pay rather than stand a second dose of the home comforts of the Orinoco. This was one of the ways in which Captain Kingdom saved his employer money and in which Mr The scum, stagnant and unresponsive, listened stolidly to his harangue, the substance of which did not differ materially, mutatis mutandis, from one of Mr Squeers' inaugural addresses to his pupils on the first morning of term at Dotheboys Hall. Captain Kingdom's peroration laid particular stress upon the fact that Messrs Gates and Dingle had been requested by him as a particular favour to adopt the policy of the thick stick and the big boot in the case of those members of the crew who refrained from looking slick in executing their orders. The crew received his re 1 marks with sheepish grins or "Where did you see anysullen scowls; and the orator concluded "Pick watches, Mr Gates, and then we'll pipe down to dinner. Are all hands on deck?" "Aye, aye, sir," replied Mr Gates, looking over his list. "I saw somebody down below a few minutes ago," drawled a voice, proceeding from a figure seated upon a bollard. It was Mr Allerton, who, with characteristic contentment with (or indifference to) his lot, had performed the unprecedented feat of signing-on for a second voyage in the Orinoco. He wore his usual air of humorous tolerance of the cares of this world, and spoke in the composed and unruffled fashion which stamps the highcaste Englishman all over the globe. His lot on board the Orinoco had been lighter than that of most, for his companions, finding him apparently impervious to ill-usage and philosophically genial under all circumstances, had agreed to regard him as a species of heavily decayed and slightly demented "dude," and had half-affectionately christened him "Peroy "-a term which sums up the typical Englishman for the New-Yorker almost as vividly as "Rosbif" and "Godam!" perform that office for the Parisian. The captain descended from the bridge, walked across the deck, and dispassionately kicked Mr Allerton off the bollard. "Stand up, you swine, when you speak to me!" he shouted. body?" Mr Allerton rose slowly and painfully from the souppers. There are moments when the rôle of a Democritus is difficult to sustain. "I'm sorry you did that, captain," he remarked, "because I know you didn't mean it personally. You had to make some sort of demonstration, of course, to put the fear of death into these new hands, but I regret that you should have singled me out as the corpus vile-you don't know what that means, I daresay: never mind!. because you have shaken up my wits so much, besides nearly breaking my hip-bone, that I shall have to pause and consider a minute before I remember where I did see the gentleman." If the captain had been Mr Gates he would probably have felled Allerton to the deck a second time. As it was, he shuffled his feet uncomfortably and glared. The broken man before him, when all was said and done, was his superior; and the captain, who was of sufficiently refined clay to be sensitive to social distinctions, was angrily conscious of that sense of sheepish uneasiness which obsesses the cad, however exalted, in the presence of a gentleman, however degraded. Allerton continued— "I remember now, captain. The man was lying in the alley-way leading to the companion. I'll go and see how he is getting on. Keep your seats, gentlemen." |