* * * * *

As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up.  Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the river....

Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the ocean.

* * * * *

There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle head, forward—­as well as the after-quarters.  Nippers and I had been separated—­he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.

* * * * *

But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct personages: 

There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a sheepherder by calling.  He had signed on for the trip, to take care of the sheep on the upper deck;

There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;

The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm—­made that way from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;

There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when we hid under the bunk).  The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of night-watchman, “to break him of his superstitious silliness”;

There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked.  He had a white wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty ... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the minute the South Sea King reached an English port, they loved each other so deeply!) ...

Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me, informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over ... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.

One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman, bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing the men, as was his duty,—­found the big fellow, with whom he used to crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep.  The watchman shook him by the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.

The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper, for that day....

The next day was Sunday.  It was a still, religious afternoon.

We men ranged in two rows aft.  The body had been sewn up in coarse canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.

The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea.  In a high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ... an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.