I dipped a corner of the towel into the water and rubbed my face, and when I had looked at the towel I judged I had wanted washing very badly indeed. By this time some fourteen or fifteen seamen had come about me; they lounged and stared, and commented freely in growling, very audible voices upon my appearance and new suit of pilot cloth. It was the forecastle dinner-hour, whence I concluded the time was something after twelve. Nearly all the ship’s company were below, some seated on their chests, eating, a few in their hammocks, smoking, and looking at me over their swinging beds; some, who had drawn close, brought their dinners in their hands, a cube of beef or a hunch of pork on a biscuit, that served as a trencher; these fellows flourished sheath- or clasp-knives, and they chewed slowly, as men whose teeth had long grown artful and wary in the business of biting on shipboard. The interior was indeed a grim, gloomy, massive picture; the men were rudely and variously and some of them half savagely attired; the place was roofed with hammocks; tiers of bunks arched into the head where they vanished in the gloom. A lamp swung under a great beam, and its light was needed, despite the brightness of the day outside, and of the shaft of daylight that floated through the open scuttle forward and hung in the obscurity like a square of luminous mist, as a sunbeam streams through a chink of closed shutter. A number of stanchions supported the upper deck, and suits of oilskins hung upon nails swayed against these wooden supports like hanged men as the ship bowed and lifted her head. The atmosphere was scarcely supportable with its mingled smells of strong tobacco and the fumes of the kids or tubs in which the greasy boiled meat had been brought in. ‘Aft with us now, youngster,’ said the boatswain, ‘and give an account of yourself. And may the Lord ha’ mercy on your soul! This here’s a convict ship; there’s nothen going under six dozen. Everything over that’s a yard-arm job.’ He grasped me by the arm and walked me out of the forecastle, but not, I thought, with the temper he had dragged me out of my hiding-place with. By this time my sight had strengthened, and, though the broad daylight outside brought the tears to my eyes, the pain passed in a moment or two.