I remembered the two mates, the super-
efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike--could
they make this human wreckage do it? They, at least, evinced no
doubts of their ability. The sea? If this feat of mastery were
possible, then clear it was that I knew nothing of the sea.
I looked back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men
who trod the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right.
These were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the
ships of the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who
had the points of their sheath-knives broken off, who killed and were
killed, but who did their work as men. These men, these shambling
carcasses at the windlass--I looked, and looked, and vainly I strove
to conjure the vision of them swinging aloft in rack and storm,
"clearing the raffle," as Kipling puts it, "with their clasp knives
in their teeth." Why didn't they sing a chanty as they hove the
anchor up? In the old days, as I had read, the anchor always came up
to the rollicking sailor songs of sea-chested men.
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