The boatswain, though well over 60 years old, short and wiry, did some quick thinking. To his mind the/only way of salvation would be to jump into the hogshead, despite the chill of a December night This he had barely done when the bull arrived. The boatswain's clumsy, six-foot mate was out of luck The jnorting bull just picked him up and Aung him through a trap-hatch above.
Then the butcher arrived on the scene prepared for lots of trouble. The beast blandly regarded the man, liked the look of him, and evidently felt ashamed, so with bowed head he walked ashore perfectly behaved, leaving two unhappy human figures to rounds of laughter. Shivering with cold, water up to his neck, stood the miserable boatswain, while his mate—stretched out along the deck above—meditated whether it was Captain Stewart was quite a character. I remember the time when he took a dislike to a young doctor from Ottawa, who, making his first voyage, and rather proud of his new uniform, used to strut up and down the saloon deck in front of the passengers, One day an Ammerican woman strode up while the ship forged ahead over a calm sea, 2
Say, Cap'n, is it always like this? When are we going to see a real Atlantic swell "Right now," answered the skipper: "Just walk along this deck and take a glance at the doctor."
Occasionally, however, he encountered a woman as smart at repartee as himself.
"What time will it be daylight in the morning was the silly question one woman asked. Poor old Stewart had been asked too many for one day, so his response was not exactly polite.
"I don't know," he said, obviously annoyed. "Go and ask the cook."
"Oh!" apologized the woman icily. "I'm sorry. But I took you for the cook."
The captain so admired her re-pattee that for the rest of that voyage he made a great friend of this passenger.
Later I became second officer to a ship named the Lusitania. Very much smaller than the Cunard liner which a German U-boat sank some years later, my new ship had been one of the Orient liners.
Internal comfort, reckoned not by modern standards but according to liners of her day, could be described as sumptuous. We left dock for ihe Mersey to embark about 900 passengers, of whom 800 were a motley crowd from all parts of Europe travelling steerage.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.