The breeze was now very lively; the canvas was stretching nobly to it, and the shore all along our starboard beam was a gliding panorama, brilliant with colour and sunshine. They were having dinner in the cuddy, and as often as I passed the skylight I could see the captain glancing upwards at the sails with a well-pleased expression.
I presently noticed the cook's copper face, crowned with an odd kind of knitted cap, protruding from the galley, and his small eyes gazed intently at me. I paced the length of the poop, and when I returned, the cook's head was still at its post, and then his body came out and he stood staring in my direction.
I had to turn abruptly to hide my mirth, for his face was ornamented with an expression of disgust exquisitely comical with the wrinkled nose, the arched thick mouth, and the screwed-up eyebrows.
When I again looked he was coming along the deck, swinging a piece of very fat pork at the end of a string. He advanced close to the poop-ladder at the top of which I was standing, and holding up the pork, said--
"Me belong to a country where we no eat pork," he exclaimed, with great gravity, still preserving his wrinkled nose and immensely disgusted expression.
"Hot country, sar," he answered. "But me will eat pork on board ship."
"But me will _not_ eat stinking pork on board ship or anywhere else," he cried excitedly.
"Is that piece of pork tainted?" I inquired.
"Don't know nuffen 'bout tainted, sar," he replied; "but it smells kinder strong. But not so strong as the liquor where t'other porks was biled in. Nebber smelled de like, sar. Most disgusting. Come and try it, sar. Make you feel queer."
"No good, sar. Fork'sle full of stinks, and men grumblin' like hell. Me fust-rate cook, too--but no make a stink sweet. Dat beats me."
He held up the pork, with an expression on his face as if he were about to sneeze, shook his finger at it as though it were something that could be affected by the gesture, and flung it overboard.
"Dat's my rations," said he. "Shouldn't like to eat de fish dat swallers it."
And turning jauntily in his frocked canvas breeches he walked off.
A few moments afterwards the extraordinary-looking man with the small face and large head, and shell-shaped back, came out of the forecastle, walking from side to side with a springing jerky action of the legs, they being evidently moved by a force having no reference to his will.