“Creaky doors” are said to “hang long,” and leaky ships may enjoy a similar longevity.  It certainly was a curious fact that the Water-Lily hardly suffered in that storm, though the damage done to shipping was very great.  Big and little, men-of-war and merchantmen, very few escaped scot-free, and some dragged their anchors and were either on the reef in the harbour, or ran foul of one another.

Repairs were the order of the day, but we managed to get ours done and to proceed on our voyage, with very little extra delay.

I cannot say it was a pleasant cruise, though it brought unexpected promotion to one of the Shamrock three.  In this wise: 

The mate was a wicked brute, neither more nor less.  I do not want to get into the sailor fashion of using strong terms about trifles, but to call him less than wicked would be to insult goodness, and if brutality makes a brute, he was brute enough in all conscience!  Being short-handed at Bermuda, we had shipped a wretched little cabin-boy of Portuguese extraction, who was a native of Demerara, and glad to work his passage there, and the mate’s systematic ill-treatment of this poor lad was not less of a torture to us than to Pedro himself, so agonizing was it to see, and not dare to interfere; all we could do was to aid him to the best of our power on the sly.

The captain, though a sneaking, unprincipled kind of man, was neither so brutal nor, unfortunately, so good a seaman as the mate; and the consequence of this was, that the mate was practically the master, and indulged his Snuffy-like passion for cruelty with impunity, and with a double edge.  For, as he was well aware, in ill-treating Pedro he made us suffer, and we were all helpless alike.

His hold over the captain was not from superior seamanship alone.  The Water-Lily was nominally a “temperance” vessel, but in our case this only meant that no rum was issued to the crew.  In the captain’s cabin there was plenty of “liquor,” and the captain occasionally got drunk, and each time that he did so, the influence of the mate seemed riveted firmer than before.  Crews are often divided in their allegiance, but the crew of the Water-Lily were of one mind.  From the oldest to the youngest we all detested the mate, and a natural manliness of feeling made us like the captain better than we ought otherwise have done, because (especially as regards the drinking) we considered his relations with the mate to be characterized by anything but “fair play.”  No love was really lost between them, and if the captain came on deck and took the lead, they were almost certain to quarrel (and none the less so, that we rushed with alacrity to obey the captain’s orders, whereas with the mate’s it was all “dragging work,” as nearly as we dare show unwillingness).