All of which was bad enough had there been no worse.  But he was vicious, malignant, dirty, and without common decency.  He was a tall, powerful man, and he fought with everybody.  And there was no fairness in his fighting.  His first fight on board, the first day out, was with me, when he, desiring to cut a plug of chewing tobacco, took my personal table-knife for the purpose, and whereupon, I, on a hair-trigger, promptly exploded.  After that he fought with nearly every member of the crew.  When his clothing became too filthy to be bearable by the rest of us, we put it to soak and stood over him while he washed it.  In short, the Bricklayer was one of those horrible and monstrous things that one must see in order to be convinced that they exist.

I will only say that he was a beast, and that we treated him like a beast.  It is only by looking back through the years that I realise how heartless we were to him.  He was without sin.  He could not, by the very nature of things, have been anything else than he was.  He had not made himself, and for his making he was not responsible.  Yet we treated him as a free agent and held him personally responsible for all that he was and that he should not have been.  As a result, our treatment of him was as terrible as he was himself terrible.  Finally we gave him the silent treatment, and for weeks before he died we neither spoke to him nor did he speak to us.  And for weeks he moved among us, or lay in his bunk in our crowded house, grinning at us his hatred and malignancy.  He was a dying man, and he knew it, and we knew it.  And furthermore, he knew that we wanted him to die.  He cumbered our life with his presence, and ours was a rough life that made rough men of us.  And so he died, in a small space crowded by twelve men and as much alone as if he had died on some desolate mountain peak.  No kindly word, no last word, was passed between.  He died as he had lived, a beast, and he died hating us and hated by us.

And now I come to the most startling moment of my life.  No sooner was he dead than he was flung overboard.  He died in a night of wind, drawing his last breath as the men tumbled into their oilskins to the cry of “All hands!” And he was flung overboard, several hours later, on a day of wind.  Not even a canvas wrapping graced his mortal remains; nor was he deemed worthy of bars of iron at his feet.  We sewed him up in the blankets in which he died and laid him on a hatch-cover for’ard of the main-hatch on the port side.  A gunnysack, half full of galley coal, was fastened to his feet.