This accounted for all the spare staterooms we had. For myself, I took the upper bunk in the mate’s room, at the same time moving the second mate to this room, where he and the mate, having alternate watches, could share the same bunk. This left the second mate’s room free for the accommodation of the steamer’s three deck officers, with two single bunks and a knock-down of pillows and blankets on the floor. In the steward’s room also there were two berths; my steward kept the lower, the first steward of the steamer had the upper, and her second steward another knock-down on the floor. In the forward house there were the galley, carpenter’s shop, and sail room, all narrow rooms running from side to side of the house, each with two doors and two windows; forward of the sail room were the two forecastles, separated from each other by a fore-and-aft partition in the middle of the house, and opening forward on either side of the fore hatch. I moved all of my crew into one forecastle, since my only watch would be sleeping at a time; and put the steamer’s crew into the vacated one, where bunks and bed clothes were ready for them to use. The engine room crowd were assigned to the carpenter’s shop; the rest of the men-folk, a miscellaneous lot, first, second, and third class passengers all together, were given the sail room. We had on board quantities of second-hand burlap and old sails, rolls and rolls of them, to be put down under the cargo of wheat, enough to line the whole inside of the ship when she was loaded; these were rolled up in the ’tween-decks after we discharged at Liverpool, to be overhauled and repaired on the passage across to New York, before being stowed away for use again in San Francisco. They were just what we needed for beds and coverings. In the two narrow rooms in the forward house, spread plenty thick on the floors, they made the finest possible knock-downs; although they were packed in pretty tight, the men couldn’t have been more comfortable in their own berths. Captain Potter wanted me to put them below the hatches. We were ballasted with salt in the lower hold, but the ’tween-decks were clean and empty; she was in splendid trim for sailing, dry as a bone in heavy weather. Undoubtedly, the ’tween-decks would have made a comfortable place for the men, with plenty of room all around. But my objection was a perfectly practical one. Every one of these men had saved his pipe; in many cases it seemed to be about all that he had saved. Pipes had been going in every mouth since they’d come aboard. And the sight of that burning steamer was seared into my eyes. It gave me the shivers merely to think of sending all those pipes to sit on a bed of sail-cloth below the hatches. Some kind of a fire was only to be expected; but a fire in the forward house would be the lesser of two evils.