d the shore in
navigating to and fro between the different places for which he was
bound, never losing sight of one prominent landmark or headland till he
could distinguish the next beyond, in the day-time, and steering by the
lighthouses and floating beacons, by night.

If times had been easy for us so far, when we arrived at Newcastle we
had terrible work to balance our good fortune in this respect.

Talk of galley slaves! no unfortunate criminals chained to the oar in
the old days of that aquatic mode of punishment ever went through half
what poor Tom and I did at this great coal centre of the north--none at
least could have suffered so much in body and spirit from the effects of
a form of toil, to which the ordinary labour of a negro slave on a Cuban
plantation would be as nothing!

The skipper never allowed us once to leave the vessel to go ashore,
although all the other hands went backwards from brig to land as it
seemed to please them, without any restraint being apparently put on
their movements; but, whether our stern taskmaster was afraid of our
"cutting and running" before he had his pound of flesh out of us, or
whether he feared being called to account under the terms of the
Merchant Shipping Act for having us on board without our names being on
the brig's books as duly licensed apprentices, when he might have been
subjected to a penalty, I know not. The fact remains, that there he
kept us day and night as long as we remained taking in a fresh cargo of
coals. We never once set foot on land during our stay in port.

And the work!

We did not have to carry the bags of coal, as the rest of the crew did,
from the wharf to the gangway of the vessel, as then we might have been
seen; but we had to bear a hand over the hatches to shunt the bags down
into the hold, into which we were afterwards sent with rakes and shovels
to stow the rough lumps into odd holes and corners and make a smooth
surface generally, until the brig was chock full to the deck-beams, when
we couldn't even creep in on our hands and knees to distribute the cargo
further!

This job being finished, the hatches were battened down, and the brig
made sail again for the south.

This time, our destination was further along the coast westwards, the
collier brig proceeding to Plymouth instead of returning to our previous
port of departure--a circumstance which rejoiced us both greatly, as we
should not have liked to have been landed again at the