d led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal,
always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs,
half-castes--would have served the devil himself had he made it easy
enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got
charge of a boat on the coast of China--a soft thing; how this one had
an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the
Siamese navy; and in all they said--in their actions, in their looks, in
their persons--could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the
determination to lounge safely through existence.

To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more
unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a fascination
in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing so well on
such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside the original
disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly, giving up
the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the Patna.

The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank. She
was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort
of renegade New South Wales German, very anxious to curse publicly
his native country, but who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck's
victorious policy, brutalised all those he was not afraid of, and wore a
'blood-and-iron' air,' combined with a purple nose and a red moustache.
After she had been painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred
pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with
steam up alongside a wooden jetty.

They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by
faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp
and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and
when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed
forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner
recesses of the ship--like water filling a cistern, like water flowing
into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the
rim. Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections
and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south
and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths,
descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossin