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The food they gave us was rough but fairly good and plentiful. Wherever the meat came from it could be masticated with some effort. In Barclay’s boarding-house, in Williamstown, we had to take a spell in the middle of a mouthful. I have seen steak there that would have pauled a chaff-cutter. In the dining-room at Salthouse Lane there lived the wildest, most eccentric clock I ever saw in all my travels. It had a most remarkable way of striking quite peculiar to itself. We used to dine at one o’clock. At noon the clock usually struck one. In very extravagant days it struck two. But no one could guess what it would strike when it was really one o’clock. I once counted seventy-two strokes, and on a public holiday it went up to a hundred and twenty. It was our only amusement.

We were allowed to come in at almost any time. When the Nova Scotian and his mate had departed the Cockney and the herring-back and I used to run together and go waltzing round the back part of Hull pretty well all night. Once we sat on the steps of a bank for nearly four hours, between twelve and four. With us were two young ladies, who were possibly not very respectable but about whom I knew nothing as I had never seen them before and never saw them again, and another young sailor who was good at yarns. I didn’t know his name. Absurd as it may seem we were all quite happy. The policeman on the beat saw that we were, and evidently hated to disturb us. He came past us three times, and each time asked us very nicely to go home. Next time he repeated his request, and as he said he would look on our doing so in the light of a personal favour to himself, we agreed to evacuate the bank at last.

Our greatest privation at the Salthouse Lane establishment was want of tobacco. We rarely had any of it. I remember one day, when want of nicotine made me very sad, we went, on my suggestion, into the bag-room and pulled out our bags and chests. My chest was what seamen call a round-bottomed chest, i.e., a sailor’s canvas bag. The beauty of it is that anything wanted is always at the bottom. In turning the bag out I found half a plug of tobacco. If we had been gold-mining and I had struck a “pocket,” or come across big nuggets we could not have been happier. We sat in the smoking-room, and having divided the plug we had a grand debauch. Of course we sometimes begged a pipe or two from luckier men about the docks, but to find a real half plug was something to gloat over.

When I had been in the Home nearly two months, and owed what seemed an amazing amount of money, I really began to think that if I could not ship in a steamer I must go in a wind-jammer again after all. So I really began to hunt round in earnest, and after trying all sorts and conditions of craft I landed on a job in the Corona of Dundee. She was a biggish composite vessel of about seventeen hundred tons register, with that horrible thing, wire running rigging. In her I made the acquaintance of one of her old crew, who had stayed by her in Hull river, who told me various yarns of her behaviour at sea, and how one man had been killed in her on her homeward passage from San Francisco. As we got to be pals he suggested I should bring some more men if I knew of any in want of a job. I brought along Ginger and the herring-back, and we went to work cleaning out the limbers. It was not a nice job, for the limbers of a ship which has been carrying wheat are, to say the least of it, rather malodorous. We scraped the rotting black muck out with boards and scrapers, and sent it up on deck. It was a two and a half days’ job. Then the mate set me over my two friends to “break out” casks of beef and pork from the fore-peak. As I hadn’t been much to sea it rather amused me to find myself bossing two men who had been at it all their lives. But I have to own that they were two of the stupidest men I ever met, though they were not bad fellows. Then the time came for us to go to London by the “run.” They offered us 30s. for the run to London river. This, with the five shillings a day I had earned by six days’ work on board, made L3. I had practically spent nothing while I was working in her, although we left the Home too early in the morning to have breakfast there. We used to go to a coffee-stall near the dock entrance and get what is described by Cockneys as “two doorsteps and a cup of thick” for about 2d. We went home for dinner and supper. Thus I had nearly all my L3 for the boss of the Home. He got the money when we were out in the “stream” with the tug ahead of us.

We were only one night at sea. We washed her down and cleaned her a bit generally and made her look a little decent, and I had the look-out that night. As we towed the whole distance we came up London river next afternoon. It was a gloomy and miserable day, which made London horrible to behold. It was like entering hell itself to come up into the parts where the big warehouses stand and where the docks are. We came at last to Limehouse, where she was to be dry-docked. I was at the wheel then, and it took us two hours before we got her in and had her settled down upon the blocks with the shores to hold her. Then I took my round-bottomed chest and left her. The mate, who had taken a fancy to me, asked me to ship in her for her next voyage, but I said I meant to “swallow the anchor” and have no more of that kind of work. My experience in Hull–the semi-starvation, the fighting, the loneliness and general blackguardism of the whole show–had somewhat sickened me of the life. And yet seamen are good fellows, and might be much better if it were not for the greed of owners, who feed them badly, house them vilely, and think of nothing in the world but dividends. Seamen know what they know, and they resent with bitterness the way they are treated. They have a bitter saying, “That’s good enough for hogs, dogs and sailors.” The day must come when England will cry to her children of the sea, and weep because they are not.