And the men!
Dore could never have conjured a more delectable hell's broth. For
the first time I saw them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns
for being afraid of them. They did not walk. They slouched and
shambled, some even tottered, as from weakness or drink.
But it was their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West
had just told me--that ships always sailed with several lunatics or
idiots in their crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic
or feeble-minded. And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human
wreckage could have been obtained. There was something wrong with
all of them. Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and
almost without exception they were under-sized. The several quite
fairly large men I marked were vacant-faced. One man, however, large
and unmistakably Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking
and muttering to himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided
man, with his head on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest
of faces and pale blue eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad
Irishman, calling him O'Sullivan.
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