Long Hart, the cook, was another kind of hero to me. He stood over six feet high in his galley felts, and his saffron complexion and creased neck spoke of foreign suns, maritime romance, and many voyages. The gold earrings he wore I suspected belonged to his dead wives. His nethers consisted of black doe-skin, his body was cased in a dark blue jersey, and a blue Phrygian cap covered his head. He disdained the use of sailors’ colloquialisms, and spoke like a school-master in very grand words. My rustic innocence appeared to have an attraction for him; on the second evening after my recovery, he offered the freedom of his galley to me, and, when I brought the apprentice kids, he was generous in his helpings of soft-tack, scouse, and duff. During the dog-watches he spun long yarns about his experiences in deep-sea ships, and voyages to Callao, California, West Coast of Africa, and elsewhere, many of which were horrible on account of the cruelty practised on sailors. I heard of poor sailors hoisted up to the yard-arm, and ducked by the run in the sea until they were nearly drowned; of men being keel-hauled, tied stark-naked to the windlass, and subjected to the most horrible indignities, put over the ship’s side to scrub the ship’s coppers in the roasting hot sun, and much else which made me thankful that the captains of the day were not so cruel as those twenty years back. His condescension to a young lubber like myself, and his generosity, won from me such deference and civility that he assumed a kind of protectorship over me, and assisted in the enlightenment of my understanding about many things. The crew consisted mainly of Anglo-Irish, Dutchmen, one or two English, and as many Yankees. They were undisciplined spirits, who found the wild sea-life congenial to their half-savage natures, and had formed the odd notion that to be sailors was to be of nobler stuff than shoremen, and accordingly swaggered magnificently whenever they could do it safely. For some reason they had conceived their nobility to lie in the fact that they had voluntarily adopted a more perilous profession than any practised by landsmen. They were adored by the girls in port, and enjoyed the privilege of gloriously swearing whenever they chose, and the pleasure of this conceit gave them happiness. Shoremen seldom swore, except the dockmen, who aped sailors’ manners and gait. They went to church, feared the constables, seldom got drunk or went on a spree, sported gloves, and seemed afraid of work.