I’m hoping we’ll be shipmates, though, to the end of this cruise. If frills and literary didos are more to your fancy, the accommodation ladder still is down, you might say, and the closing of these pages will set you ashore again before we get under way. My refusal to make any public statement other than appeared during the inquiry, and my silence since that time have been misconstrued -so here’s my story and if a plain, unvarnished yarn will suit your taste, you’ll have it. It’s a job not at all to my liking, mind you, for I’m not the man to dodge consequences or excuse my actions, and my vindication lies in the verdict of the board of inquiry, who added to its finding the kind of tribute a seaman is proud to earn. But since the loss of my vessel under such tragic circumstances first was made known in the press of this country, I have had such a flood of abuse slung at me from seamen’s welfare outfits, tender-hearted but misinformed old ladies and the like, that under pressure from friends I have decided to make public my side of the affair. What would you have done, had you been master, in mid-Pacific, of a tramp ship with eighteen murderous Chinese lepers at one end, a mutinous crew at the other, and a tropic gale blowing up!įIFTEEN the world years in stinking of barging old tin-pot about tramp ships is not the best schooling you can get in the use of words, except perhaps, of the hardweather variety that reddens landsmen’s ears and I’d rather take a haul on a fore-to,-gallant brace any day, than pick up a pen. #Mutiny vapors codeThe code of the sea is so different from that by which landsmen chart their course through life that it is hard to judge without injustice.
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