[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Wreck of the Golden Mary #3/47

A
brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very neat
figure and rather under the middle size,
never out of the way and never in it, a face
that pleased everybody and that all children
took to, a habit of going about singing as
cheerily as a blackbird, and a perfect sailor.

We were in one of those Liverpool hackney-coaches
in less than a minute, and we cruised
about in her upwards of three hours, looking
for John. John had come home from Van
Diemen’s Land barely a month before, and I
had heard of him as taking a frisk in Liverpool.
We asked after him, among many
other places, at the two boarding-houses he
was fondest of, and we found he had had a
week’s spell at each of them; but, he had
gone here and gone there, and had set off
“to lay out on the main-to’-gallant-yard of the
highest Welsh mountain” (so he had told the
people of the house), and where he might be
then, or when he might come back nobody
could tell us. But it was surprising, to be
sure, to see how every face brightened the
moment there was mention made of the name
of Mr. Steadiman.

We were taken aback at meeting with no
better luck, and we had wore ship and put
her head for my friends, when, as we were
jogging through the streets, I clap my eyes
on John himself coming out of a toyshop!
He was carrying a little boy, and conducting
two uncommon pretty women to their coach,
and he told me afterwards that he had never
in his life seen one of the three before, but
that he was so taken with them on looking
in at the toy-shop while they were buying
the child a cranky Noah’s Ark, very much
down by the head, that he had gone in and
asked the ladies’ permission to treat him
to a tolerably correct Cutter there was in
the window, in order that such a handsome
boy might not grow up with a lubberly idea
of naval architecture.

We stood off and on until the ladies’
coachman began to give way, and then we
hailed John. On his coming aboard of us,
I told him, very gravely, what I had said to
my friend. It struck him, as he said himself,
amidships. He was quite shaken by it.
“Captain Ravender,” were John Steadiman’s
words, “such an opinion from you is true
commendation, and I’ll sail round the world
with you for twenty years if you hoist the
signal, and stand by you for ever!” And
now indeed I felt that it was done, and that
the Golden Mary was afloat.

Grass never grew yet under the feet of
Smithick and Watersby. The riggers were
out of that ship in a fortnight’s time, and
we had begun taking in cargo. John was
always aboard, seeing everything stowed with
his own eyes; and whenever I went aboard
myself, early or late, whether he was below
in the hold, or on deck at the hatchway, or
overhauling his cabin, nailing up pictures in
it of the Blush Roses of England, the Blue
Belles of Scotland, and the female Shamrock
of Ireland: of a certainty I heard John
singing like a blackbird.

We had room for twenty passengers. Our
sailing advertisement was no sooner out, than
we might have taken these, twenty times over.
In entering our men, I and John (both together)
picked them, and we entered none
but good hands—as good as were to be
found in that port. And so, in a good
ship of the best build, well owned, well
arranged, well officered, well manned, well
found in all respects, we parted with our
pilot at a quarter past four o’clock in the
afternoon of the seventh of March, one thousand
eight hundred and fifty-one, and stood
with a fair wind out to sea.

It may be easily believed that up to that
time I had had no leisure to be intimate
with my passengers. The most of them were
then in their berths sea-sick; however, in
going among them, telling them what was
good for them, persuading them not to be
there, but to come up on deck and feel the
breeze, and in rousing them with a joke, or a
comfortable word, I made acquaintance with
them, perhaps, in a more friendly and confidential
way from the first, than I might have
done at the cabin table.