It was a case of being as nippy as fleas after that, because we _had_ to beat the _Hercules_. You should have seen the Angel and Cousin Bob in blue overalls, with white cap covers pulled down over their heads, digging out for daylight down in my coal lighter among the foretopmen, all of them as black as niggers, shovelling coal into baskets, passing them up the side, dodging the lumps of coal which fell out of them and the empty baskets thrown back from the ship. There wasn’t much of the Angel left about either of them then. At the end of the first hour we’d got in 215 tons, and as the little numeral pendants 2-0-7 ran up to the _Hercules_ foreyard-arm to show how many tons she had taken in, our chaps cheered. We’d beaten her by eight tons. ’I bet she cheated even then,’ I heard Bob tell his chum. We were still a ton or two to the good after the second hour, and then the ’still’ was sounded in both ships, and every one went to breakfast. You should have been there to have seen us in our coaling rigs—simply a mass of coal dust and looking like a lot of Christy Minstrels—squatting on the deck outside the gun-room, and stuffing down sardines with our dirty hands, every one talking and shouting and as merry as pigs in a sty. Even young Marchant, the new clerk, had got into a coaling rig of sorts and worked like a horse—he was so keen to beat the hated _Hercules_. I gave them all a quarter of an hour to stuff themselves, and then down we clambered into the lighters again and began filling baskets—nobody, not even the Angel, shirking a job like this, when there was the chance of getting even with the _Hercules_. The men came struggling down after us, long before the breakfast half-hour was finished, and we could see the _Hercules’_ people swarming down into her lighters as well. In all the lighters we must have had sixty tons or more in baskets before the bugler sounded the commence, the ship’s band upon the booms banged out ’I’m afraid to go home in the dark,’ the drum doing most of it; the men began cheering and singing the chorus, and the baskets began streaming on board again. By the end of the fourth hour we were as hard at it as ever, but then Commander Robinson—we didn’t care for him much, as he was such a bully—began bellowing at us, because the _Hercules_ was fifteen tons ahead. We could hear her chaps cheering. The band banged out again ’Yip-i-addy,’ and the Skipper, with his eyeglass tucked in his eye and his long hair straggling over his neck, walked round the upper deck singing down to the lighters, ’Go it, lads, we must beat ’em.’ Down in my lighter the men were working like demons. They looked like demons too, got up in all sorts of queer rigs, and only stopping to take a drink from the mess tins of oatmeal water which the ’Scorp’[#] lighterman ladled out for them. [#] Natives of Gibraltar are often called ’Scorps’ (Rock Scorpions). ’Look out how you’re trimming your lighter, Wilson,’ the Commander had bellowed.