ly scraped
together. A bad lot, he could see at first sight--rough, ribald, and
drunken. In all there are eleven of them, the second mate included; the
last, as already stated, a Spaniard, by name Padilla. There are three
others of the same race--Spaniards, or Spanish-Americans--Gil Gomez,
Jose Hernandez, and Jacinto Velarde; two Englishmen, Jack Striker and
Bill Davis; a Frenchman, by name La Crosse; a Dutchman, and a Dane; the
remaining two being men whose nationality is difficult to determine, and
scarce known to themselves--such as may be met on almost every ship that
sails the sea.

The chief officer of the _Condor_, accustomed to a man-o'-war, with its
rigid discipline, is already disgusted with what is going on aboard the
merchantman. He was so before leaving San Francisco, having also some
anxiety about the navigation of the vessel. With a crew so incapable,
he anticipated difficulty, if not danger. But now that he is out upon
the open ocean, he is sure of the first, and keenly apprehensive of the
last. For, in less than a single day's sailing, he has discovered that
the sailors, besides counting short, are otherwise untrustworthy.
Several of them are not sailors at all, but "longshore" men; one or two
mere "land-lubbers," who never laid hand upon a ship's rope before
clutching those of the _Condor_. With such, what chance will there be
for working the ship in a storm? But there is a danger he dreads far
more than the mismanagement of ropes and sails--insubordination. Even
thus early, it has shown itself among the men, and may at any moment
break out into open mutiny. All the more likely from the character of
Captain Lantanas, with which he has become well acquainted.

The Chilian skipper is an easy-going man, given to reading books of
natural history, and collecting curiosities--as evinced by his brace of
Bornean apes, and other specimens picked up during his trading trip to
the Indian Archipelago. A man in every way amiable, but just on this
account the most unfitted to control a crew, such as that he has shipped
for the voyage to Valparaiso.

Absorbed in his studies, he takes little notice of them, leaving them in
the hands, and to the control, of his _piloto_, Harry Blew.

But the ex-man-o'-war's man, though a typical British sailor, is not one
of the happy-go-lucky kind. He has been entrusted with something more
than the navigation of the Chilian ship--with the charge of two fair
ladies in