‘It’ll be all eight,’ answered the second officer: ‘it would be ten had she worked herself loose of the grip of the stevedores. She wants the mainsail and foreto’garn’sail. These old buckets are manufactured to creak, and whilst they creak, they hold, it is said.’ His face crumpled up into a grin that made him look twenty years older under the thatch of his sou’-wester curling to his eyebrows, with the broad flaps over his ears like a nightcap for his sea-helmet to sit upon. ‘Pray, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘was any damage done to the ship by the collision last night?’ ‘There wasn’t so much as a rope-yarn parted,’ he answered. ‘I looked to see the spritsail yard sprung, for it’ll have been that spar, I reckon, which dragged the lugger’s masts overboard by the shrouds of them. But it’s as sound as anything else aboard the ship.’ He shifted uneasily, as though to make off, and, turning my head, I spied the captain looking into the binnacle. So, having had already enough of the deck, I stepped below for a smoke in the cuddy recess, where I found Mr. Emmett in a long cloak, such as mysterious assassins and renegade noblemen used to wear at the Coburg Theatre, sucking at a large curled meerschaum pipe, and arguing on the subject of longitude with a little man almost a dwarf, an honest and highly intelligent pigmy, with the head of a giant supported on the legs of a boy of six, an amiable earnest little creature, with a trick of looking up wistfully into your face. His name was Richard Saunders: and I afterwards understood that he was proceeding to India on behalf of some Pharmaceutical Society, to collect information on and examples of Hindu and other medicines, drugs, charms, and so forth. Well, all that day it continued to blow a very strong wind. The ship’s plunging increased as the Channel opened under her bow and admitted something of the weight of the Atlantic in the run of its seas. There was a constant sharp-shooting of spray forward over the forecastle, and the wet came sobbing along; the lee scuppers to where the cuddy front checked it under the poop ladder. Very few of us assembled at lunch or at dinner.