It was this way on the _Port Edes_. Forward and aft, engine-hold and pantry, each man on board of her had his private sea-failings. Between them they lacked wakefulness, eyesight, decision, strength of fist, strength of language, seamanship, and common sobriety. Amongst the deck-hands there were virulent sea-lawyers; in the stokeholds there was _âmes damnées_ wanted by several Governments. The engineers were skilful in gaining the smallest possible knottage per ton of coal; the mates were all slipshod navigators, untrustworthy even to correct a compass and useless to drive a truculent crew. Over all was Owen Kettle, master mariner. Whatever his failings might be (and the index of them tailed out), they did not show prominently at the head of such a ship’s company. Like all men in the merchant marine, he had been bred in the roughest school; but, unlike his successful brethren, he had not graduated later on to the smooth things of a well-manned passenger liner. For his sins he had remained the pitiful knock-about skipper, a man with knife-edged words always ready on the lip of his teeth, a leaden whistle in one jacket-pocket, and a lethal weapon in the other. He was an excellent seaman and navigator—a man capable of going an entire voyage without taking off his clothes or enjoying one watch of regular sleep. Whilst in command at sea, he credited himself with the powers of a Czar, and was entirely unscrupulous in gaining ends which expediency or his owners laid down for him; and though not physically powerful, he had the pluck of a dog, and an unholy reputation for marksmanship. Taking into allowance these qualifications, it may be understood that for the handling of such a menagerie of all-nation scoundreldom and incapacity as bunked in the S. S. _Port Edes_, no better man than Owen Kettle breathed in either hemisphere. The crew signed their marks on the articles at the shipping office in the Sailors’ Home, and went off grumbling to get rid of their advances. Later, most of them turned up on the steamer; some with their worldly goods done up in dunnage sacks (which look to the uninitiated like pillow-slips); some apparently possessing nothing but the squalid raiment they stood up in. There was not one of them dressed like a sailor, according to the conventional idea, yet most of them had made their bread upon the seas since early boyhood, which shows what conventional ideas are sometimes worth. They were most of them oldish men, and looked even older than their years.