The Wreck of the Golden Mary | Page 5

quite. "Well, well," says he,
"come down to Liverpool to-morrow with me, and see the Golden
Mary." I liked the name (her name was Mary, and she was golden, if
golden stands for good), so I began to feel that it was almost done when
I said I would go to Liverpool. On the next morning but one we were
on board the Golden Mary. I might have known, from his asking me to
come down and see her, what she was. I declare her to have been the
completest and most exquisite Beauty that ever I set my eyes upon.
We had inspected every timber in her, and had come back to the
gangway to go ashore from the dock-basin, when I put out my hand to
my friend. "Touch upon it," says I, "and touch heartily. I take command
of this ship, and I am hers and yours, if I can get John Steadiman for
my chief mate."
John Steadiman had sailed with me four voyages. The first voyage John
was third mate out to China, and came home second. The other three
voyages he was my first officer. At this time of chartering the Golden
Mary, he was aged thirty-two. 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 toyshop 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,