The doctor now told me to pass on to the quarter-deck, and I thought he meant to take me below and lock me up again. Instead of which he left me standing outside the barricade and went on to the poop, where he joined Captain Sutherland and his military companions, all of whom had been gazing at us from over the brass rail whilst we talked with Mr. Barney Abram. I could not understand the meaning of this doctor’s purposeless questions and behaviour, but I dare say I was right when I supposed he intended to let everybody see and understand he was first in the ship. Always, in the days of the convict ship, the unhappy criminals were dispatched across the sea in charge of a naval medical officer appointed by the admiralty, and called the surgeon-superintendent. The ship was virtually placed in his hands to do what he pleased with, and, though I don’t suppose he was empowered to interfere in the navigation of the vessel, he was undoubtedly privileged to order the master to call into such ports on the way as he (the surgeon) might choose to name; thereby retarding the voyage of the ship, and perhaps imperilling her, as was the case with a certain convict ship which was nearly lost through the surgeon ordering that she should make Simon’s Bay under conditions of season and weather which the captain declared dangerous. Hence there was usually a strong feeling between the surgeon-superintendent and the captain and mates. I suspected something of the sort here, and believed Doctor Russell-Ellice had given himself a great deal of unnecessary trouble to prove me a rogue, merely that the captain and the mates should see what a very clever fellow he was, and how very much in earnest also in his resolution to strut to the very topmost inches of his little dignity and his brief authority. CHAPTER XX SHE CONVERSES WITH HER COUSIN