This type of brutality was calculated to "put the fear of God into us," as they say, and to strengthen discipline, and add snap and vigor to our movements. It certainly had the effect of showing us how important it was to be in the waist when the watch was mustered.
At the morning washdown the black slops that went by the name of coffee tasted like the very nectar of the gods. We dipped in with our hook pots, drinking it with relish, and the fact that it possessed mild cathartic properties, may have had something to do with the excellent state of our health. Cockroaches were not mentioned in the old scale of provisions[5] adopted by a kind Congress for the nourishment of the simple sailor-man. This was no doubt an oversight on the part of some bucolic "sailor's friend," for they might have specified that "one ounce of cockroaches may be substituted for an ounce of tea."
Our tea was never without these disgusting vermin and none of us was ever able to tell what gave it the peculiar flavor that we came to relish—the twigs and leaves floating about in the brown liquor, or the roaches lying drowned in the bottom of the can.
"They's no worse nor shrimps," philosophized Jimmy Marshall, and we tried to believe him.
The cook, an ancient Celestial named Chow, hailing from Hong Kong, had evidently put all of his gods behind him. His pigtail was gone, and with it all sense of decency, so far as preparing food for sailor-men was concerned. Those human precepts that all cooks are supposed to act upon, the ethics, if you will, of the noble profession, that Marryat tells us entitled the practitioner to wear a sword, in those good old days when the Admiralty recognized the cook, were lacking in the breast of Chow. He was a typical deepwater cook. What went aft was right, so far as looks count anyway, but the kids that left for the fo'c'sle often contained the most unsavory messes that ill-fortune can concoct. Some of the men had words with Chow about this but the result was increased carelessness and decreased portions.
"It don't do no good to scrap with the cook," was Jimmy Marshall's sage advice. "If the dirty bum wants to be dirty he can fix us all up. I knowed a cook once wot —— in the soup an' bully on a English bark. The skipper, he caught him at it, an' puts him in irons. The cook had to be let out though because he was the only one wot could do the work, an' they was mighty careful aft not to rile him after they knowed wot he was. You got to leave them cooks alone."
We left Chow severely alone, and some of the crowd, Joe and Tommy especially, constituted themselves his volunteer assistants, and almost every first dog watch, one of them would be around the galley helping out. Chow rewarded them by allowing the use of the oven to make "dandy funk," a mess of broken hard tack and molasses, baked to a crisp.
When ten days had elapsed, after the final rations of fresh provisions had been issued, a tot of lime juice, that reeked suspiciously of vinegar, was served each day—by Act of Congress—to keep the sailor-man from getting scurvey. At the same time the "harness casks," beef to starboard, and pork to port, did their duty nobly and each week or so we would lift the forehatch and rouse up a slimy, wooden hooped barrel, and roll it aft to the galley door, alternating to the port and starboard harness casks.
After a month of chumming it with Frenchy, talking steadily from three to four hours a night, we were both pretty well cleaned out of experiences and ideas. Other groups had long before reached that deplorable state, and new combinations were formed in the night walks on deck. One night as we came on deck in the midwatch, Frenchy and I noticed Jimmy Marshall and Martin standing at the lee of the main hatch, in silence, after the watch had been mustered. The absence of their usual animated discussions of everything temporal and mundane attracted our attention. Soon we found ourselves at the lee of the hatch; Martin and Jimmy warmed up to us and presently Jimmy and myself were walking just aft of the forward house, and Martin and Frenchy began to pace the deck to windward.
Jimmy was a new sort of chum and the poorest listener I have ever met, which may have accounted for the peculiar one sided lay of his mind. The hard knocks of experience were alone accountable for his knowledge, varied and picturesque in the telling. He was chockful of religion and was constantly repenting the bad deeds of his youth, telling them at great length, and with such relish, that it seemed they had come to be his one unfailing source of enjoyment. A terrible drunk in his day, he had also indulged in robbery, having looted a house in Australia while tramping overland to Sydney from Port Hunter, where he had "jumped" a schooner, leaving everything behind, because of a row with the mate, in which he felled him with a handspike.