t, and, swinging round
on his heel, shambled away down the ladder leading from the bridge to
the spar-deck, and departed on his errand.

The _Pericles_ was an iron single-screw steamer of two thousand tons or
thereabout. She was employed in the carriage of nitrates, silver ore,
hides, etcetera, between Chilian ports and Liverpool. She was owned by
a company, which also possessed two similar vessels employed in the same
trade. Captain Fisher, her skipper, had a considerable number of shares
in this company, a circumstance which accounted in no small measure for
the fact of his being the skipper of the _Pericles_; for a man less fit
to have the control of other men it would have been exceedingly
difficult to find.

Fisher was a man of enormous stature and splendid physique, but his
features, which would otherwise have been considered handsome, were
marred by a ferocious expression, due to his chronic condition of ill-
humour. He was constantly "hazing" his men, and was never at a loss for
an excuse for irritating them in every possible way. In this pleasing
occupation he was ably seconded by his first mate, an American, named
Silas Hoover. Between the pair of them they had contrived, during the
course of the several voyages which they had performed together, to
render their men thoroughly dissatisfied almost to the verge of mutiny;
and there is little doubt that long before this the crew would have
given open and forcible expression to their feelings had it not been for
the efforts of the second mate, a young fellow of eighteen years of age,
named James Douglas. This was the individual for whom Fisher had just
sent. He had conceived a most virulent hatred for him, in consequence,
probably, of the fact that Douglas was the only officer in the ship for
whom the men would work willingly and for whom they showed any real
respect. The lad had been left an orphan at an early age, and as he
showed even from he first a predilection for a seafaring life, he had
been sent by his uncle at the age of fourteen as an apprentice on board
a sailing ship, and during the four following years he had gradually
worked his way upward until now he was second mate of the _Pericles_.

Up to the time when he joined that ship he had had no cause to regret
his choice of a profession; but the six or seven months which he had
spent under Fisher had proved so thoroughly unpleasant that he had made
up his mind he would leave the ship at the f