They found a flask of liquor in the pocket of each man, which they threw overboard without ceremony. Quickly the others were dragged out and searched. Some of them showed fight, but they were quickly cuffed into submission. In a few moments all were out and set to work but one man. He braced himself full length across the little room in such a way that the united strength of the two officers could not budge him. “I’ll try the steam winch on him,” said the first mate. He took a short rope and put a noose around the man’s legs, and made the other end fast to the steam winch. “Oh! you’ll pull his legs off!” Dick shouted from the bridge as the mate started the winch. “We’ll see which’ll give way first,” Mr. Gran answered; “the winch, the foc’s’le, or the man.” CHAPTER IX. A STRANDED SHIP AND A BOARD OF SURVEY. In a struggle between steam and iron on the one side and human flesh on the other, the flesh must generally give way; and it was so in this case. The winch turned, the rope tautened, and in another second something must have broken. The man was more sober than his companions, as well as more stubborn; and the moment the rope began to strain he simply bent his body, and the winch drew him easily out upon the deck. A minute later he was unfastened and set to work. “That’s the usual picnic we have at the beginning of a voyage,” Captain Godfree said when, everything being in working order, he returned to the bridge. “We ship a new set of seamen for each voyage, and they generally come aboard too drunk for duty. A bad condition that poor Jack has come to in these days, isn’t it? You see the minute they arrive in New York after a voyage they are seized upon by the sailors’ boarding-house keepers, who get all their money away from them and supply them with food and drink till it’s time to get rid of them. Then the boarding-master finds a new ship for Jack and gets an order for his advance pay, and brings him aboard so full of Water Street whiskey that half the time the man doesn’t know what ship he is on, nor where he is going. If the boys who think of running away to sea knew what the life of a modern sailor is, they’d go rather slow.” “I should think it would be dangerous to take the ship to sea with a crew that you know nothing about,” Dick suggested. “Oh, no. You see there are enough of us who belong with the ship to handle her. Besides myself there are the first and second mates, the chief engineer and first and second assistants, the quartermaster, and four stokers. With these and the supercargo and the cook and two stewards, we can keep the crew in order.” Dick expected to have a view of the whole length of the New Jersey coast, as he had had in the Alameda; but in this he was disappointed. The Smeaton Tower headed a little east of south as soon as she passed Sandy Hook, her bow pointed direct for Porto Rico; and in about two hours the American coast sank below the horizon.