Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [66]
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was a fourth room answering as a head for those occupying the great cabinthough the term "great" could only be applied to it out of courtesy. Neal was hard at work copying The Seaman's Secrets onto sheets of paper stitched together, but Captain Dean took me by the arm and urged me toward the deck when I stopped to look at Neal's writing.
"Don't waste a minute," the captain said. "This Langman is a troublemaker. He hates your father for giving him a dressing down, and somehowprobably by keeping his ears open at the Riverside Tavernhe found out that I insured this vessel and our cargo with your father. He's been gabbing about it all over the ship. Insured for vast sums, he's telling the men. Vast sums, for God's sake! You probably know how much insurance I took outtwo hundred and fifty pounds!"
He halted me at the top of the companion ladder. "That's why I'm so anxious to stow that cordage, and get to sea before Langman has a chance to go ashore and talk. If he ever hears about that dead man, he'll put two and two together, and he'd be bound to figure ten as the answer."
For a time I feared that Langman might inflict some of his contrariness on Neal, but apparently he had been made wary by my father's protest against his employment of boys at small wages. He walked widely around Neal, but I often caught him looking at the boy out of the corners of his eyes, as one watches a thunderhead that may become dangerous.
Of course I couldn't be sure, but I felt that Langman didn't know that Neal had ever been in any way connected with Penkethman's players. Even so, I was apprehensive, and Captain Dean was equally fearful; so the two of us
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worked the men hard at loading the cordage, and I had my first look at the company with whom I was to spend the most important days of my life.
Sailors to me are a mystery, always, and I shall forever be at a loss as to why men of their own free will take to the sea. To my way of thinking a ship is no better than a prison, and those who sail upon her, barring the captain, do so out of desperation or out of their inability to make a living on the land.
Our ship's cook, for example, Cooky Sipper, could never have been a cook anywhere except on a merchant vessel, where there's little to eat save salt pork, salt beef and ship's biscuit. As a seaman and a stower of cordage he was useless; and being a fat man, he succeeded at only two things: perspiring easily and getting in everyone's way. He was of so little use to us that I asked Langman to send him back to his galley.
The Nottingham accidentallyand because of Langman's insistence when he sold the Nottingham to the Deanscarried two bos'ns, George White and Nicholas Mellen, both former shipmates of Langman. A bos'n, because he has charge of all sails, rigging, canvas, colors, anchors, cables and cordage, must of necessity be an able seaman, and White and Mellen certainly were able, even though they were thick as thieves with Langman. White had a depression at the end of his nose, like the stem-end of a peach, and Mellen was so cross-eyed that I didn't see how he could steer a boat.
The carpenter, Chips Bullock, looked a little like his name, for he would stand with head lowered, staring at a task to be done, then rush at it like a bull, pushing and heaving and grunting.
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The other men in the crewWilliam Saver, Christopher Gray, Charles Graystock and Harry Hallionwere about the same sort of sailors that every resident of Greenwich was accustomed to see in taverns, or wandering aimlessly along the streets: people who seemed to have come from nowhere and to be bound for nowhere.
Saver had enormous ears and never smiled except when he heard of trouble occurring to someone. He wasn't particular. Anyone would do.
Christopher Gray was a gunner who had lost two fingers and had his eyelids blown full of powder grains. I doubted that he could lay a gun effectively, but I never found out, fortunately.
Graystock was a small