“I joined to-morrow.  It was twenty-two years ago; and I was just twenty.  How time passes!  It was one of the happiest days of my life.  Fancy!  Second mate for the first time—­a really responsible officer!  I wouldn’t have thrown up my new billet for a fortune.  The mate looked me over carefully.  He was also an old chap, but of another stamp.  He had a Roman nose, a snow-white, long beard, and his name was Mahon, but he insisted that it should be pronounced Mann.  He was well connected; yet there was something wrong with his luck, and he had never got on.

“As to the captain, he had been for years in coasters, then in the Mediterranean, and last in the West Indian trade.  He had never been round the Capes.  He could just write a kind of sketchy hand, and didn’t care for writing at all.  Both were thorough good seamen of course, and between those two old chaps I felt like a small boy between two grandfathers.

“The ship also was old.  Her name was the Judea.  Queer name, isn’t it?  She belonged to a man Wilmer, Wilcox—­some name like that; but he has been bankrupt and dead these twenty years or more, and his name don’t matter.  She had been laid up in Shadwell basin for ever so long.  You may imagine her state.  She was all rust, dust, grime—­soot aloft, dirt on deck.  To me it was like coming out of a palace into a ruined cottage.  She was about 400 tons, had a primitive windlass, wooden latches to the doors, not a bit of brass about her, and a big square stern.  There was on it, below her name in big letters, a lot of scroll work, with the gilt off, and some sort of a coat of arms, with the motto ‘Do or Die’ underneath.  I remember it took my fancy immensely.  There was a touch of romance in it, something that made me love the old thing—­something that appealed to my youth!

“We left London in ballast—­sand ballast—­to load a cargo of coal in a northern port for Bankok.  Bankok!  I thrilled.  I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way—­but Bankok!

“We worked out of the Thames under canvas, with a North Sea pilot on board.  His name was Jermyn, and he dodged all day long about the galley drying his handkerchief before the stove.  Apparently he never slept.  He was a dismal man, with a perpetual tear sparkling at the end of his nose, who either had been in trouble, or was in trouble, or expected to be in trouble—­couldn’t be happy unless something went wrong.  He mistrusted my youth, my common-sense, and my seamanship, and made a point of showing it in a hundred little ways.  I dare say he was right.  It seems to me I knew very little then, and I know not much more now; but I cherish a hate for that Jermyn to this day.