Our prisoners came aboard. Among them were eight British marines who had been assigned to the steamer as a gun crew. The fat captain looked around our deck with a sort of belligerent curiosity. He walked up to our smokestack gun, and you couldn't have told his face from a beet. "Captain, is that the thing that made that hell of a racket?" "Yes." "Where are your torpedoes?" "Torpedoes? We have no torpedoes." "No torpedoes? That was a fake, too?" "Yes." "By Joe, Captain, don't report that, by Joe." I promised him I would not report it, and told him heartily that he had behaved like a true British skipper, and no man could have done better. Aye, things have changed on the sea. When I went aboard that steamer, I had to sit there and look around and think. She was a freighter, and what were freighters like when I was in the fo'c'sle? That wasn't so long ago, twenty-odd years, but ships and customs change rapidly. I was in a magnificent saloon, with heavy carpets, glittering candelabra, and big, luxurious club chairs. Paintings in heavy frames hung on the wall. In one corner was a Steinway grand piano and beside it a music rack. There were other musical instruments, a melodeon, a violin, a guitar, a ukulele. Freighters nowadays often have better officers' accommodations than passenger ships. They have more space for them and their voyages are longer, sometimes a year or more. The shipowners provide comforts and luxuries to make the long periods at sea less burdensome. The sailors, too, are put up in far better style than formerly. In my time, even on the biggest freight steamers, the officers had simple quarters and the seamen had little more comfort than they had on the sailing ships. I remembered the various ships on which I had hauled at ropes and swabbed the deck. "By Joe," I thought, "if they had told you of anything like this, you would have thought them ready for a lunatic asylum." The hold of the steamer was no less interesting than the officers' saloon. The cargo was valued at a million pounds sterling. It included five hundred cases of rare cognac and twenty-three hundred cases of champagne, Veuve Cliquot. That was something. "Ho! boys," I called, "lend a hand. There's a bit of work here." We took the musical instruments, the piano, violin, 'cello, melodeon, and all. We had aboard the _Seeadler_ a pianist and a violinist, both excellent musicians out of the German conservatories. We had no room in our cabins to hang the paintings, so I gave them to our captive captains to take with them when they left our ship. Some of the expensive furniture fitted nicely in the _Seeadler's_ cabins. Of the cognac and champagne we ferried aboard as much as we could stow away. We opened the sea cocks of the steamer, and she settled down peacefully beneath the waves. XVII THE LAST CRUISE OF THE POOR OLD _PINMORE_