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ALL that night we were in a great bustle getting things
stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squire's
friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish
him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a
night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work;
and I was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the
boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man
the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary,
yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and
interesting to me--the brief commands, the shrill note
of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the
glimmer of the ship's lanterns.
"Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave," cried one voice.
"The old one," cried another.
"Aye, aye, mates," said Long John, who was standing by,
with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in
the air and words I knew so well:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--"
And then the whole crew bore chorus:--
"Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
And at the third "Ho!" drove the bars before them with
a will.
Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old
Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice
of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor
was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows;
soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping
to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to
snatch an hour of slumber the HISPANIOLA had begun her
voyage to the Isle of Treasure.
I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was
fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship,
the crew were capable seamen, and the captain
thoroughly understood his business. But before we came
the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had
happened which require to be known.
Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the
captain had feared. He had no command among the men,
and people did what they pleased with him. But that
was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two
at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red
cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of
drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in
disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes
he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of
the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be
almost sober and attend to his work at least passably.
In the meantime, we could never make out where he got
the drink. That was the ship's mystery. Watch him as
we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when
we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he
were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he
ever tasted anything but water.
He was not only useless as an officer and a bad
influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this
rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was
much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with
a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more.
"Overboard!" said the captain. "Well, gentlemen, that
saves the trouble of putting him in irons."
But there we were, without a mate; and it was
necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The
boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard,
and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as
mate. Mr. Trelawney had followed the sea, and his
knowledge made him very useful, for he often took a watch
himself in easy weather. And the coxswain, Israel Hands,
was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who could be
trusted at a pinch with almost anything.
He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so
the mention of his name leads me on to speak of our
ship's cook, Barbecue, as the men called him.
Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round
his neck, to have both hands as free as possible. It
was something to see him wedge the foot of the crutch
against a bulkhead, and propped against it, yielding to
every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking
like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to
see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He
had a line or two rigged up to help him across the
widest spaces--Long John's earrings, they were called;
and he would hand himself from one place to another,
now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the
lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet
some of the men who had sailed with him before
expressed their pity to see him so reduced.
"He's no common man, Barbecue," said the coxswain to
me. "He had good schooling in his young days and can
speak like a book when so minded; and brave--a lion's
nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple
four and knock their heads together--him unarmed."
All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a
way of talking to each and doing everybody some
particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and
always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as
clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and
his parrot in a cage in one corner.
"Come away, Hawkins," he would say; "come and have a
yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my
son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here's Cap'n
Flint--I calls my parrot Cap'n Flint, after the famous
buccaneer--here's Cap'n Flint predicting success to our
v'yage. Wasn't you, cap'n?"
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