a foul anchor is worse than the most fallacious of false hopes that ever lured men or nations into a sense of security.  And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad councillor.  It is the sense which, like that exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster.  A seaman labouring under an undue sense of security becomes at once worth hardly half his salt.  Therefore, of all my chief officers, the one I trusted most was a man called B-.  He had a red moustache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy eye.  He was worth all his salt.

On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling which was the outcome of the contact of our personalities, I discover, without much surprise, a certain flavour of dislike.  Upon the whole, I think he was one of the most uncomfortable shipmates possible for a young commander.  If it is permissible to criticise the absent, I should say he had a little too much of the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a seaman.  He had an extremely disturbing air of being everlastingly ready (even when seated at table at my right hand before a plate of salt beef) to grapple with some impending calamity.  I must hasten to add that he had also the other qualification necessary to make a trustworthy seaman—­that of an absolute confidence in himself.  What was really wrong with him was that he had these qualities in an unrestful degree.  His eternally watchful demeanour, his jerky, nervous talk, even his, as it were, determined silences, seemed to imply—­and, I believe, they did imply—­that to his mind the ship was never safe in my hands.  Such was the man who looked after the anchors of a less than five-hundred-ton barque, my first command, now gone from the face of the earth, but sure of a tenderly remembered existence as long as I live.  No anchor could have gone down foul under Mr. B-’s piercing eye.  It was good for one to be sure of that when, in an open roadstead, one heard in the cabin the wind pipe up; but still, there were moments when I detested Mr. B- exceedingly.  From the way he used to glare sometimes, I fancy that more than once he paid me back with interest.  It so happened that we both loved the little barque very much.  And it was just the defect of Mr. B-’s inestimable qualities that he would never persuade himself to believe that the ship was safe in my hands.  To begin with, he was more than five years older than myself at a time of life when five years really do count, I being twenty-nine and he thirty-four; then, on our first leaving port (I don’t see why I should make a secret of the fact that it was Bangkok), a bit of manoeuvring of mine amongst the islands of the Gulf of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare.  Ever since then he had nursed in secret a bitter idea of my utter recklessness.  But upon the whole, and unless the grip of a man’s hand at parting means nothing whatever, I conclude that we did like each other at the end of two years and three months well enough.