It was quite a small vessel, rigged in a bastard fashion he had never seen before, square on the main mast, exaggerated lugs on the fore and mizzen. She had low sharp entry, but was built up aft with quarter-deck and poop; she was armed like a frigate and swarming with men. Ortho could not think where she housed them all—and such men, brown, yellow, white and black, with and without beards. Some wore pointed red caps, some wisps of dirty linen wound about their scalps, and others were bare-headed and shorn to the skin but for a lock of oily hair. They wore loose garments of many colors, chocolate, saffron, salmon and blue, but the majority were of a soiled white. They drew these close about their lean bodies and squatted, bare toes protruding, under the break of the quarter-deck, in the lee of scuttle butts, boats, masts—anywhere out of the wind. They paid no attention to him whatever, but chatted and spat and laughed, their teeth gleaming white in their dark faces, for all the world like a tribe of squatting baboons. One of them produced a crude two-stringed guitar and sang a melancholy dirge to the accompaniment of creaking blocks and hissing bow-wave. The sunset was but a chink of yellow light between leaden cloud and leaden sea. There was a flash away in the dusk to port followed by the slam of a gun. A gigantic old man came to the quarter-deck rail and bellowed across the decks. Ortho thought he looked like the pictures of Biblical patriarchs—Moses, for instance—with his long white beard and mantle blowing in the wind. At his first roar every black and brown ape on deck pulled his hood up and went down on his forehead, jabbering incoherently. They seemed to be making some sort of prayer towards the east. The old man’s declamation finished off in a long-drawn wail; he returned whence he had come, and the apes sat up again. The guitar player picked up his instrument and sang on. A boy, twirling a naming piece of tow, ran up the ladders and lit the two poop lanterns. Away to port other points of light twinkled, appearing and disappearing. The negro who had given him the broth touched him on the shoulder, signed to him to follow, and led the way below. It was dark on the main deck—all the light there was came from a single lantern swinging from a beam—but Ortho could see that it was also packed with men. They lay on mats beside the hatch coamings, between the lashed carriage-guns, everywhere; it was difficult to walk without treading on them. Some of them appeared to be wounded.