Two very youthful apprentice boys, fair haired and rosy faced, with china-blue eyes, were among her complement. These children, they were nothing more, gloried in the most awful command of profanity. The boys were to be seen wandering about ashore of an evening, their faded blue uniform caps proclaiming them the sons of doting parents who were willing to pay a bonus of fifty pounds in order that their boys might learn the rudiments of seamanship and navigation on the clipper ship _British Monarch_, late of the China and Australia trade. "Uniform is worn--meaning the caps--and the young gentlemen are berthed in separate quarters in the cuddy house." So read the tale that snared them. However, nothing except hunger ever seemed to happen to these lads, and as they flattened their noses against the confectioner's windows ashore, they were unconsciously absorbing lessons that might be of value to them in after life.
Like most English ships of this class, the _British Monarch_ was a disgrace to the sea and in no way representative of the best traditions of the English service. The system in vogue in ships of her kind may be epitomized as one of _least work_ and _less food_. Day after day the crew would sling a scaffold plank over her side and chip her rusty plates in a languid, melancholy way, interspersing their half-hearted labors by lengthy discussions. Small patches of the chipped surface would be coated with red lead and the _British Monarch_ looked like a tattered sea rover wearing a very much torn coat through which patches of red undershirt were visible.
Her gear aloft was most slovenly, Irish pendants hanging from every yard, and her spars taking any direction in which they happened to be at the time the braces were belayed. Her skipper, a youngish man and very unassuming, would scull about the harbor in a small jolly boat visiting his friends. Why the crew stayed by the ship was a mystery, with good billets going begging for sailor-men to hold them; however, when we learned that they had a year's payday on the books and were looking forward to some happy distant time when that rusty ark would drop her anchor in the Thames or Mersey, the reason for their staying by was plain.