“I understand you, sir.” He smiled on my giving him the _sir_ for the first time. “You want to get at the character of your crew as promptly as may be.” “That I may clear my forecastle of whatever is doubtful. A cargo of five hundred and fifty thousand dollars makes a rich ship, and a rich ship is a wicked temptation to wicked men. It is a pity we could not manage with fewer hands; but death, sickness, many disabling causes are to be considered; the voyage is a long one--there is the Horn; we could not have done with less men.” “I wonder what notion of this voyage the men have in their heads,” said I. “I watched them while you talked. I could not see that they made sign by grin, or stare, or look.” “They would not be sailors if they were not careless of the future,” said Greaves. “What’s for dinner to-day? _That’s_ it, you know. Is there a shot in the locker? Is there a drop of rum in the puncheon? Is there a fiddle aboard? and if the answer be yea, marry, a clear, strong, manly bass voice sings out, ‘All’s well.’ Those men don’t care, because they don’t think. Can’t you hear them talk, Fielding?--‘Where the blazes are we bound to, I wonder?--Hand us that pipe along for a draw and a spit, matey.’--‘I’m for the land o’ shoe-shine arter this job, bullies’--‘Der bork in dis schip vhas goodt,’ says a Dutchman. Then grunt goes another, and snore goes a third, and the rest is snorting. Don’t it run so, Fielding? _You_ know sailors as well as I. But I’ll tell you what; it’ll put gunpowder into the heels of their imaginations, to learn that we’re going to load dollars out of a derelict. They shan’t know yet a bit. Well it is that Van Laar doesn’t know either. Tulp was for having me explain the nature of our errand to him. ‘No, by Isten,’ said I--which I believe is Hungarian--‘no, by Isten,’ I exclaimed, ‘no man shall know what business we’re upon till I have gained some knowledge of the character of the company of fellows who are under me.’” “All this makes me feel your confidence in me the more flattering, sir,” said I. “Don’t _over_ sir me. I must replace a guzzling and gorging baboon of a Dutch mate--a worthless mass of unprofessional fat--I must replace this hogshead of lard by a _man_, and Galloon finds me the man I need lying half-drowned off Ramsgate. I want him very earnestly, very imperatively. I must have a mate--a smart, English seaman. Here he is; but how am I to keep him? He is not going to be detained by vague talk of a voyage whose issue I decline to say anything about, whose motive is mysterious--criminal, for all he is to know--imperiling the professional reputation of those concerned in it, with such a gibbet as that which stands upon the sand hills at the end of it all. No; to keep you I must be candid, or you wouldn’t have stayed.” “That is true.”