mbled into seafaring life by some
mistake, cockatoo-tufted Welshmen spitting and swearing like cats,
broken-down loafers, grey-headed, penniless, and pitiful, swaggering
boys, and very quiet men with gashes and cuts on their faces. It is an
ethnological museum where all the specimens are playing comedies and
tragedies. The head of it all is the "Deputy Shipping," and he sits,
supported by an English policeman whose fists are knobby, in a great
Chair of State. The "Deputy Shipping" knows all the iniquity of the
river-side, all the ships, all the captains, and a fair amount of the
men. He is fenced off from the crowd by a strong wooden railing behind
which are gathered the unemployed of the mercantile marine. They have
had their spree--poor devils--and now they will go to sea again on as
low a wage as three pound ten a month, to fetch up at the end in some
Shanghai stew or San Francisco hell. They have turned their backs on the
seductions of the Howrah boarding-houses and the delights of
Colootollah. If Fate will, "Nightingale's" will know them no more for a
season. But what skipper will take some of these battered, shattered
wrecks whose hands shake and whose eyes are red?

Enter suddenly a bearded captain, who has made his selection from the
crowd on a previous day, and now wants to get his men passed. He is not
fastidious in his choice. His eleven seem a tough lot for such a
mild-eyed, civil-spoken man to manage. But the captain in the Shipping
Office and the captain on his ship are two different things. He brings
his crew up to the "Deputy Shipping's" bar, and hands in their greasy,
tattered discharges. But the heart of the "Deputy Shipping" is hot
within him, because, two days ago, a Howrah crimp stole a whole crew
from a down-dropping ship, insomuch that the captain had to come back
and whip up a new crew at one o'clock in the day. Evil will it be if the
"Deputy Shipping" finds one of these bounty-jumpers in the chosen crew
of the _Blenkindoon_.

The "Deputy Shipping" tells the story with heat. "I didn't know they did
such things in Calcutta," says the captain. "Do such things! They'd
steal the eye-teeth out of your head there, Captain." He picks up a
discharge and calls for Michael Donelly, a loose-knit, vicious-looking
Irish-American who chews. "Stand up, man, stand up!" Michael Donelly
wants to lean against the desk, and the English policeman won't have it.
"What was your last ship?" "_Fairy Queen._" "When did y