‘Then you don’t know sailors, my dear sir. Let me just show you by an instance. One day in dock at home, while loafing on the forecastle-head,^* I noticed two respectable salts coming along, one a middle- aged, competent, steady man evidently, the other a smart youngish chap. They read the name on the bows, and stopped, looking at her. Says the elder man: “Apse Family. That’s the sanguinary female dog [I’m putting it in that way] of a ship, Jack, that kills a man every voyage. I wouldn’t sign in her—not for Jo, I wouldn’t.” And the other says: “If she were mine, I’d have her towed on the mud and set on fire, blame if I wouldn’t.” Then the first man chimes in: “Much do they care. Men are cheap, God knows!” The younger one spat in the water alongside. “They won’t have me—not for double wages.” They hung about for some time, and then walked up the dock. Half an hour later I saw them both on our deck, looking round for the mate and apparently very anxious to be taken on. And they were.’

‘How do you account for this?’ I asked.

‘What would you say?’ he retorted. ‘Recklessness? The vanity of boasting in the evening to all their chums: “We’ve just got shipped in that there Apse Family. Blow her! She ain’t going to scare us.” Sheer sailorlike perversity? A sort of curiosity? Well—a little of all that, no doubt. I put the question to them in the course of the voyage. The answer of the elderly chap was:

‘ “An man can die but once.” The younger assured me in a mocking tone that he wanted to see “how she would do it this time.” But I tell you what: there was a sort of fascination about that brute.’

Jermyn, who seemed to have seen every ship in the world, broke in sulkily:

‘I saw her once out of this very window, towing up the river. A great, black, ugly thing, going along like a big hearse.’

‘Something sinister about her looks, wasn’t there?’ said the man in tweeds, looking down at old Jermyn with a friendly eye. ‘I always had a sort of horror of her. She gave me a beastly shock when I was no more than fourteen, the very first day—nay, hour—I joined her. Father came up to see me off, and was to go down to Gravesend^* with us. I was his second boy to go to sea. My big brother was already an officer then. We got on board about eleven in the morning, and found the ship ready to drop out of the basin, stern first. Ten minutes afterwards the voyage began. She had not gone three times her own length when, at a little pluck the tug gave her to enter the dock-gates, she made one of her rampaging starts, and put such a weight on the deck-rope—a new six-inch hawser—that forward there they had no chance to ease it round in time and it parted. I saw the broken end fly up high in the air. Next moment she came against the pierhead with a jar that staggered everybody about her decks. She didn’t hurt herself—not she. But one of her boys the mate had sent aloft on the mizen^* to do something came down on the poop-deck—thump! right in front of me. He was not much older than myself. We had been grinning at each other only a few minutes before. He must have been handling himself carelessly, not expecting to get such a jerk. I heard his startled cry, “Oh!” in a high treble, as he felt himself going, and looked up in time to see him go limp all over as he fell. Ough! Poor father was remarkably white about the gills when we shook hands in Gravesend. “Are you all right?” he says, looking hard at me. “Yes, Father.” “Quite sure?” “Yes, Father.” “Well, then, good-by, my boy.” He told me afterwards that at half a word from me he would have carried me off home with him there and then. … I am the baby of the family, you know,’ added the man in tweeds, stroking his mustache, with an ingenuous smile.

‘This might have utterly spoiled a chap’s nerve for going aloft, you know, utterly. He fell within two feet of me, cracking his head on a mooring-bitt.^* Never moved. Stone-dead. Nice-looking little fellow, he was. I had just been thinking we would be great chums. … However, that wasn’t yet the worst that brute of a ship could do. I served in her three years of my time, and then I got transferred to the Lucy Apse for a year. The sailmaker we had in the Apse Family turned up there too, and I remember him saying to me, one evening after we had been a week at sea: “Isn’t she a meek little ship?” No wonder we thought the Lucy Apse a dear, meek little ship after getting clear of that big, rampaging, savage, brute. It was like heaven. Her officers seemed to me the restfulest lot of men on earth. To me, who had known no