Those days were busy enough. Mr. Scarlett and I between us had "shaken up" the crew with a vengeance. Moore wished he’d never been born. I had the whole crew "fallen in" and said a few words to them, letting them know that I was going to stand no nonsense, and that until the _Bunder Abbas_ was clean above and below, inside and out, bright work polished and paintwork clean, nobody would have any afternoon sleep whatever. The trouble of it all was that there were so few of them that either they were on watch or standing off. The whole crew consisted of only ten white men, besides myself and the gunner: Moore, the petty officer; Dobson, a quiet, determined-looking leading seaman; four able seamen—Andrews, Jackson, Wiggins, and Griffiths; a signalman named Hartley—the laziest man on board; and three marines—Webster, the corporal, and Jones and Gamble, privates. Picked men they were, I knew, though they had been allowed to get "out of hand". Webster, the corporal, was, as far as I could judge, the best man among them. He did the duties of ship’s corporal, steward, sick-berth steward, and writer—and did them well too. In addition to these there was Jaffa, the Persian interpreter, silent and dignified, always spotlessly clean—a good-looking fellow if he had not had a cataract in one eye. Jaffa was far and away ahead of all the other natives. He gave you the impression that he was the descendant of Persian emperors, brooding over the deserted grandeur and humbled state of his country at the present time. In fact, I treated him with the greatest respect from the very first day. There were three lascar drivers and nine lascar firemen to look after the boilers and engine, their own lascar "bundari" or cook, another cook of some unknown nationality, and his boy, to cook for the rest of the crew. These two were the most depressed, dirty-looking objects I had ever seen. One or the other, generally both, could be seen at any hour of the day—or night, I believe—crouched on the deck, outside the little galley, swishing a dirty cloth round the middle of a saucepan or dish, gazing dejectedly across the sea, and looking as if they longed to jump into it and finish all their worries. Last but one was a snuff-coloured Goanese carpenter; and, last of all, Sinamuran, our Tamil boy from Trincomalee, who "did" for Mr. Scarlett and myself, and soon began to look quite respectable. We never had to call "Percy" a second time, day or night, before he had glided, silent as a ghost, to our elbows, looking with solemn black eyes to see what was wanted. This was the strangely-assorted crew collected in the little _Bunder Abbas_—thirty in all, and speaking half a dozen languages. The white crew lived aft and the coloured men for’ard.