The tug pulled the Kelvinhaugh to the Tail of the Bank and the barque dropped her anchor there. During the journey down the river the second mate kept Donald busy on odd jobs, and several times he was in close proximity to Captain Muirhead, but the latter never even greeted him by word or look. When the tug departed, the Captain eyed the sky, cloudy and overcast, and went below to his cabin. Hinkel also went below, after ordering Donald to sweep up the poop, and he was sweeping when Mr. Nickerson came aft.

“Waal, boy, what d’ye think of it all?” he enquired blithely. “Goin’ to like it?”

“I’ll like it after a while, sir,” answered Donald with a smile. “When I get more used to the ship and the work.”

The mate laughed and a saturnine smile came over his sharp features. “Which means you don’t think a hell of a lot of it so far, eh? Waal, son, ye’re dead right. It’s a dog’s life, and the man who goes to sea for a livin’ nowadays ’ud go to hell for pleasure!” And after delivering the ancient deep sea proverb, he too turned and went below.

After sweeping up the poop, Donald went down to the half-deck and found Thompson having his dinner. “Come along, nipper!” he cried cheerfully. “What’ll you have? Roast stuffed duckling with baked potatoes, string beans and brussels sprouts, jam roly-poly and coffee! How would that suit you?”

“That would suit me fine!” exclaimed Donald eagerly looking for evidences of such a menu.

“You bally well bet it would suit you!” laughed Thompson, “but there ain’t no sich luck, as the Yankees say! Here’s your chow! Dig in and curse your uncle!” As he spoke he pushed a large tin pan containing mushy potatoes and a fat, disgusting lump of pork, towards Donald. He also indicated a hook-pot and a small wooden half-pail. “There’s the tea and coffee in the pot—it’s coffee in the morning and tea at other times, but it’s the same stuff—and there’s hard bread in the barge there. Sink me! I don’t know why I left a comfortable home to go knocking around in one of these mean Scotch ships!”

Donald helped himself to the food and made a meal of the worst viands he had ever swallowed in his life. “Is it always like this?” he asked, disgustedly pushing the mess-kit away from his sight.

“Always like this?” echoed Thompson in mock indignation. “Well, I’m blowed! Godfrey, nipper, you’ll appreciate chow as good as that afore this trip’s ended! Yes, siree! you’ll learn to thank the good Lord for a penny herring and a slice o’ white bread and a real potato yet. And you’ll eat your fill o’ rotten grub afore you hit the beach again, my son! Such ungratefulness, Oliver Twist!—damned if it ain’t!”

Thompson would have continued in this strain for a while, but there came a tug at the half-deck door and two youths leaped in dragging bags and chests. “Hullo, Jack!” shouted both in unison. “Here we are again!” Both were dressed in apprentice’s uniform and were chunky lads around sixteen years of age. “Who’s the new chum, Jack?” queried one—a chubby, curly-haired chap with a pleasant smile and nice white teeth.

Thompson waved a lazy hand. “McKenzie, meet Jenkins and Moore. Jenkins has done one stretch, but Moore has only four days of his four years in. Jenkins here is a fat-head for sleep, while Moore is a young sailor but a damned old soldier and would sooner skulk than work. Now you know them!”

Jenkins laughed, but Moore scowled. He was a swarthy complexioned lad with a large ugly mouth and beady black eyes. Donald sized his two shipmates up quickly. Jenkins would be alright, but Moore would be quarrelsome. Two minutes later, his deductions were verified when both started to protest at having to take lower bunks. “I say, Thompson, old man,” said Jenkins, “the nipper will have to turn out of that bunk—”

“No he won’t,” answered Thompson, calmly smoking away. “I told him to put his truck there and he’ll stay there!”

“Oh, I say, dam’-it-all,” expostulated Jenkins. Moore started to pull Donald’s stuff out of the bunk. Donald jumped to his feet. “What the deuce are you doing with my things?” he cried calmly.

“I’m goin’ to take this bunk,” he growled. “If you or Jenkins want a punch in the jaw, I’ll give it to you!”

Donald realized in a flash that his comfort in future absolutely depended upon himself—nobody else would help him here, so he gave Moore a blow on the mouth with all the power of his right fist. The Irish lad’s beady eyes snapped savagely, and with the blood streaming from his cut lips, he went for Donald and the two mixed it up in a proper rough and tumble.

Thompson jumped from the seat and hauled Moore away. “You leave McKenzie and his bunk alone, you blighter, or I’ll wipe the deck with you! You take that bunk there and be blamed glad to get it!” And he hove Moore down into the worst located of the two lowers.

Donald sat down panting with an eye which was rapidly discoloring. “I say, Jenkins,” he said to the other apprentice, “I’m sorry to have done you out of a good bunk, but I’m game to toss you for it—” “No, you won’t,” laughed Jenkins. “It serves me right for not joining the ship in Glasgow. First come, first served. You keep the bunk, nipper. Let’s have a drink!” He produced a bottle of whisky, and on Donald refusing to join in, they offered a drink to Moore, who sullenly accepted.

This whisky drinking by lads of sixteen and twenty rather shocked Donald, but he had scarcely been an hour in the company of the three before he heard enough to convince him that there wasn’t much in the way of vice they didn’t know. The drinking, swearing, and the recounting of vicious adventures and questionable stories caused Donald to wonder why such wickedness was not visited by instant retribution from Heaven. Blasphemy and the ribald use of the most sacred things seemed to roll from the tongues of his companions like water from a fountain.

Thompson had been applying himself to the bottle rather heavily and he was fast becoming “tight.” He turned around to Donald, who was sitting on his chest listening to the talk. “Look at that poor l’il devil there!” he drawled thickly. “I like that l’il feller—he’s such a pale-faced skinny l’il nipper. He c’d crawl through a ring-bolt, by Godfrey! Ne’mind, son! You’ve jus’ got t’ learn to drink a four-finger nip ‘thout blinkin’ or coughin’, an’ learn to spin nine hundred dirty yarns, an’ swear to music, an’ keep watch snoozin’ between bells, an’ you’ll be a real dyed-in-the-wool shellback, with every finger a fishhook, and every hair a ropeyarn, an’ blood of Stockholm tar!” Thompson rambled on. “His uncle owns this hooker. Th’ lousy Scotch miser! But he don’t love that kid, he don’t. Sends him to sea in this ruddy coffin an’ fits him out with a donkey’s breakfast and a dog’s wool blanket an’ a kit ye could shoot peas through—”

A heavy tramp of sea-booted feet halted outside. Jenkins whipped the bottle away, as the broad ugly face of Mr. Hinkel appeared in the door. “Now, den, vot are you lazy defils loafin’ avay your time in here for?” he rasped in his guttural brogue. “Gome oudt of dot und bear a hand to bend der flying yib und overhaul some of der gear aloft. Dam’ rigger’s snarls everywhere und dam’ lazy boys loafin’ und yarnin’ und egspecting Gottalmighty to do der vork!” He slammed the door and Jenkins extended a spread hand with a thumb to his nose, while Thompson cursed the second mate for a “beastly yumping yiminy Yudas Dutchman!”

The boys toiled and mucked all afternoon in the rain and bitter wind, and Donald crawled to his bunk at seven that evening aching in every limb and muscle and with his hands skinned and painful. For hours he tossed around listening to the snores of his ship-mates, and the sighing of the rain-laden wind in the gear aloft. It had been an eventful day, but a day in which his clean ideal of a sea-life had been rudely shattered. He was seeing it now in its naked, unvarnished, unromantic reality, and he was realizing that if he would hold his own he must protect his rights by physical force and steel himself to endure many hardships in soul and body; case-harden his finer feelings, and rigorously restrain all impulses of sympathy and the fine charity which can be exhibited ashore. His father was the embodiment of all that was good and honorable and kind, yet, no doubt, he was as unimpressionable and as callous as Thompson or even Mr. Nickerson, while roughing it in his early days at sea. He thought of Thompson and Jenkins. Both these lads were “straight” according to youthful ethics, but how rough and tough they were in their sea-life, yet, in their homes they were possibly, and probably, as fine, true and as honorable young fellows as those environed by gentler walks of life. Sea-ways were not shore-ways, and it did not take Donald long to find out that a sea-life would make of a man exactly what he himself desired. Youth was left very much to his own resources. There was no mother to caress or to correct in a ship’s half-deck, and in the ruck of it all, with its disgusting familiarity, evil talk and callousness, the lad who had the instincts of a gentleman and a clean heart implanted in him, would come through it without being contaminated in mind or speech or diseased in body.

The Kelvinhaugh lay for three days at the Tail of the Bank getting ready for sea. Though a brand new ship and fresh from the riggers’ yard, yet there was more to do in getting her ready than in a craft that had been under sailors’ hands for a dozen voyages. Standing gear had to be screwed up again, running gear rove off through the right leads and a hundred and one small gadgets installed which riggers omit and sailors have to fit. In this work, Donald did his share and spent many hours aloft working with the other lads. There was a rare thrill in this climbing and toiling with good honest cordage up in the tops and on the yards—and he felt that clambering and swinging about on the barque’s dizzy eminences savored of the real adventure of sea-faring. Like all boys, he could climb, and being free from giddiness, he thoroughly enjoyed the view from aloft. Looking down on the ship, she appeared to his unsailorly eye, a most beautiful model, and the men working on deck seemed as pigmies, while he, suspended like Mahomet’s tomb, between sea and sky, felt a strange exhilaration—a sensation which lent zest to the work and made him look to the future with a happier heart. Alas, he was unconsciously imbibing the doctrines of all sailoring, in which one remembers the good times and forgets the hardships and the miserable days.

On the third day there was enough blue in the sky “tae mak’ a Hielanman a pair o’ breeks” and the wind was coming away fair for a slant south. The two short-shipped men had turned up, dazed and useless in the aftermath of a carouse, and were in the fo’c’sle “sleeping it off.” At nine a tug came out, and the bos’n having got steam up in the donkey, the anchor was hove up without capstan-bar or chantey, and the Kelvinhaugh trailed at the end of a tow-line down the Firth of Clyde with a fresh northerly breeze whipping the short combers into white-capped corrugations.

By mid-afternoon the barque had pulled through the Cumbraes and the captain was up on the poop squinting around. He had discarded his shore toggery and slumped around in a cloth cap, a cardigan jacket, heavy woollen pants and carpet slippers. After a long scrutiny of sky and sea, and a tap at the mercurial barometer hanging in the chart-house, he spoke to the mate. “We’ll get the muslin on her when she comes up wi’ Arran. Wi’ this northerly we’re no needin’ a tug and A’m thinkin’ we’ll be safe in rinnin’ doon the Irish Channel.”

The mate nodded. “Aye, sir. Looks like a fair wind, sir!” And he sniffed at the breeze like a hound scenting his quarry. The Old Man grunted and resumed his pacing along the weather side of the poop.

When the high purple-heathered hills of Arran came abeam, the master ceased his pacing. “Get yer tops’ls on her, mister!” he ordered the mate, and his quiet command seemed to galvanize ship and crew to stirring action. “Loose tops’ls!” roared Mr. Nickerson, and the hands working on “stowing-away” jobs, at which they were time-spinning, seemed to be imbued with new life. “Loose tops’ls—he says!” cried the bos’n directing his squad. “Move yerselves, blast ye! Loose th’ fore, you! Main an’ mizzen you! Look spry now, my sons, or ye’ll have th’ mate down among ye wi’ some Yankee salt to put on yer tails!” The latter sotto voce.

Donald went up with Thompson to the lower mizzen topsail yard, and under the senior apprentice’s direction, cast the confining gaskets adrift. Almost simultaneously from the three masts came the shout, “All gone, sir. Sheet home!” As the canvas rustled and flapped from the yards and bellied in the restraining gear, the mate’s nasal bawlings could be heard injecting action. “Lay daown from aloft you skulkers ’n get some beef on them tops’l sheets. Look slippy naow!” The chain sheets rattled and clanked through the sheaves as the men, standing on the fife-rail and deck, hove down, “hey-ho’ing!” and barking, on the slack and brought the lower clews of the fore lower topsail nigh to the sheaves of the fore-yard-arms. A man squinted aloft after the last sweat had been given at the sheets. “What a hell ov a poor cut sail,” he remarked.

“To yer main an’ mizzen tops’ls naow!” came the mate’s roar. “Never mind gamming. Ye’re not on a spouter (whaler)!” Main and mizzen lower topsails were set to the wind, and the Kelvinhaugh started to drive ahead on her own and the tow-rope began to light up. “Up on yer foretopm’st-stays’l!” “Stand-by to get that tow-line aboard. For’ard with ye!” The tug blew a blast of her whistle and made a wide sheer from under the bows. The tow-rope was let go, and while twenty men hauled the wet, snakey manilla aboard over the foc’slehead, the tug steamed around and came up on the barque’s weather quarter to receive a material valediction—in the shape of a bottle of whisky—and the last letters. Donald saw the package being thrown down on the tug’s decks at the end of a heaving-line, and he watched with some anxiety for the safety of the hastily-written note which he had indited to his mother. It was a cheerful note—full of optimism which he did not feel when writing it, and he played up the most promising and alluring aspects of a sea-life and the men in whose company he would be for many months. Poor lad! the romantic ideal was fast fading and it was hard to write paragraphs of happy fiction with Thompson and Jenkins swapping gloomy prognostications for the future over the mess-table.

The tow-boat blew a long farewell blast from her whistle and dropped astern. Within five minutes she had swung around and was steaming up the Firth as fast as her slatting paddle-blades would take her, and with her went the Kelvinhaugh’s last link with the land for many a long day.

“Upper tops’ls naow!” came the order, and under the curseful directions of the two mates and the bos’n, able-bodied, ordinary and apprentice seamen were hustled from job to job, and in the midst of the action, Donald scarce realized that he was assisting to carry out those wonderful manoeuvres over which he had gloated in printed page. Somehow the actual seemed different from the visionary. There was surly venom in the barking orders of—“Tops’l halliards naow an’ put yer bloody backs into it you lazy hounds!” and such bitter remarks as “Struth! A poor bunch of beef in this crowd. Sailormen have all died an’ nawthin’ left naow but skulking kids an’ broken-down sojers!” which came from the mate. In the novels the mate was usually a bluff, fatherly old codger who sung out “Heave away, my lads!” or “Haul away, my hearties!” in a hurricane roar, and with many good-humored asides interspersed between orders, but in cold realism on the Kelvinhaugh, Donald felt that Mr. Nickerson was only using his tongue because he was denied the use of his fist and boot, and the hulking German second mate growled and grunted and pushed in sullen self-restraint because British sea laws forbade him commencing the voyage by killing someone.

Running with square yards past the Arran hills, the deep-laden barque ploughed along with all hands sweating at the halliards and sheets and dressing the Kelvinhaugh in her “muslin.” Her tops’l yards were heavy, and it did not take the old hands in the crew long to realize that they had signed in a “work-house” in this short-handed, heavily-sparred craft. With the tops’l halliards led to a main-deck capstan, the crew stamped around straining at the bars in sullen silence. The stolid, brutal German barked guttural curses—he was too thick-headed to notice anything unusual in this silent labor, but the keen-eared mate sensed the absence of the deep-water working chorus, and he was down on the scene in a minute giving tongue.

“Come on thar’, bullies! Ain’t thar’ a chantey-man in the crowd? Strike a light someone! A chantey does the work of ten men, so walk her raound an’ sing aout!” A West Indian negro showed his white teeth in an ingratiating smile and the mate spied him. “A black-bird to sing every time!” he cried. “Come you coon—loosen up yer pipes an’ shout an’ walk them tops’l yards to the mast-head!” Thus encouraged, the negro commenced in a clear tenor,

“Bark you hounds!” roared the mate. “Sing aout an’ heave ’round!” And the chorus was timidly voiced in half-a-dozen keys.

The black soloist pushed and sang.

Then the crowd, warming to their work, roared in unison.

The ancient chantey “took hold” and the men woke up from their sullen apathy and stamped around the clinking capstan roaring the plaintive refrains to the negro’s quavering solo. The mate stood watching with a smile on his keen visage. “That’s what we want to hear aboard these hookers!” he said. “When I don’t hear a craowd singin’ out they’re liverish and I’m ready to dose ’em up with a double whack of black draught!”

Whether it was through a new spirit of cheerfulness at getting under sail or through dread of the old sea medicine, the crowd commenced chanteying, and in hauling out the topgallantsail sheets and mastheading the royal yards, Donald felt something of seafaring romance, amidst the hard work and his burning hands, in lustily bawling the ancient choruses of “Sally Brown I love yer daughter!” “Whisky Johnny,” or “On the plains of Mexico.”

By the time Pladda was abeam, it was becoming dark, and the barque, sail-clad from scupper to truck, was rolling, a creamy “bone in her teeth” from her blunt bows and slugging along with a slight roll to port and starboard. With the blue bulk of Ailsa Craig ahead over the jib-boom and her royals and fores’l set, the big wind-jammer began to smell the windy spaces of her unsailed traverses, while aft on the poop paced the Old Man—proud of his new command and anxious to see how she was shaping up. Down in the half-deck, Donald, aching in bone and muscle, and with hands blistered, skinned and paining, gulped his tea in a daze, with but one consuming desire—to get into his bunk and court blessed oblivion.