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The cruise happened before the steam-trawler ousted the smack from the North Sea. A few newspapers recorded it in half-a-dozen lines of small print which nobody read. But it became and–though nowadays the Willing Mind rots from month to month by the quay–remains staple talk at Gorleston ale-houses on winter nights.

The crew consisted of Weeks, three fairly competent hands, and a baker’s assistant, when the Willing Mind slipped out of Yarmouth. Alexander Duncan, the photographer from Derby, joined the smack afterwards under peculiar circumstances. Duncan was a timid person, but aware of his timidity. He was quite clear that his paramount business was to be a man; and he was equally clear that he was not successful in his paramount business. Meanwhile he pretended to be, hoping that on some miraculous day a sudden test would prove the straw man he was to have become real flesh and blood. A visit to a surgeon and the flick of a knife quite shattered that illusion. He went down to Yarmouth afterwards, fairly disheartened. The test had been applied, and he had failed.

Now, Weeks was a particular friend of Duncan’s. They had chummed together on Gorleston Quay some years before, perhaps because they were so dissimilar. Weeks had taught Duncan to sail a boat, and had once or twice taken him for a short trip on his smack; so that the first thing that Duncan did on his arrival at Yarmouth was to take the tram to Gorleston and to make inquiries.

A fisherman lounging against a winch replied to them—

“If Weeks is a friend o’ yours I should get used to missin’ ‘im, as I tell his wife.”

There was at that time an ingenious system by which the skipper might buy his smack from the owner on the instalment plan–as people buy their furniture–only with a difference: for people sometimes get their furniture. The instalments had to be completed within a certain period. The skipper could do it–he could just do it; but he couldn’t do it without running up one little bill here for stores, and another little bill there for sail-mending. The owner worked in with the sail-maker, and just as the skipper was putting out to earn his last instalment, he would find the bailiffs on board, his cruise would be delayed, he would be, consequently, behindhand with his instalment and back would go the smack to the owner with a present of four-fifths of its price. Weeks had to pay two hundred pounds, and had eight weeks to earn it in. But he got the straight tip that his sail-maker would stop him; and getting together any sort of crew he could, he slipped out at night with half his stores.

“Now the No’th Sea,” concluded the fisherman, “in November and December ain’t a bobby’s job.”

Duncan walked forward to the pier-head. He looked out at a grey tumbled sky shutting down on a grey tumbled sea. There were flecks of white cloud in the sky, flecks of white breakers on the sea, and it was all most dreary. He stood at the end of the jetty, and his great possibility came out of the grey to him. Weeks was shorthanded. Cribbed within a few feet of the smack’s deck, there would be no chance for any man to shirk. Duncan acted on the impulse. He bought a fisherman’s outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green globes of the Mouse. The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o’clock the next night far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on the Dogger.

The Willing Mind’s boat came aboard the next morning and Captain Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had learnt that the smack was shorthanded.