And so on, until, in triumphant tones, the legal gentleman exclaimed, "Then I submit that you have no right at all to deduct one penny from my client's miserable earnings. By your own admission he could perform all those duties, very necessary duties, about which I have questioned you. They had to be performed by some one, and surely you do not expect to get the work of your ship done for nothing," etc. In the result the man got his wages in full, and the skipper went away in the belief that the law was a dangerous thing to meddle with, even if you knew you were right. But every sailor worth his salt knows what it means to get a few of these yokels foisted upon a ship. They can be, and they are, put upon the dirty work, the unskilled labour, of which there is so much to be done; but, in addition to the fact that they cannot do even that work in sailor fashion, all the work which they cannot do at all falls upon their shipmates who can. This often means terrible overwork and suffering for everybody on first leaving home, before "useless articles" have been taught their work aloft. I know of no more difficult position to be in than aloft on a top-gallant yard, for instance, in a snowstorm in the Channel, with three other men, for the purpose of furling the sail, and finding that two of them are not only useless, but helplessly in the way. Poor wretches, they are suffering, too, no doubt, clinging to the yard in an agony lest they shall fall, sick with fright; but the men who _must_ do their work are the ones deserving of pity. They get neither pity nor pence for the extra work they do.
Of all the injustice from which the sailor suffers, I know of none that he feels more keenly than this. To be shipmates with half a dozen wasters who are getting the same pay and treatment as himself, to be overworked because they cannot do the first thing at sailorizing, and as likely as not obliged to keep very quiet in the fo'c'sle, because of them being in the majority, is a bitter pill to swallow. One very unpleasant recollection of my own is of a ship where I was an A.B. In my watch, besides myself, there was a Swede, a very good man; a little Frenchman from St. Nazaire, who was also a smart sailor-man; a Finn, who knew how to do his work, but was so slow and stupid that he was very little good; another Frenchman from the vicinity of Nice, who, strange to say, was useless, and, in addition, knew only about half a dozen words of English; a big, brutal bully of a fellow, who was a Briton, I grieve to confess, and one of the basest sort; also a negro ordinary seaman. With such a watch, those of us who could do what we were asked had a very hard time of it; and, to make matters worse, the big Briton was, although as worthless an animal as ever stepped on a ship's deck, the "boss" of the forecastle. I was working hard for my certificate, and did not care to complain; until at last, in Hong Kong, while that great loafer was quietly sitting in the shade, toying with the task of chipping the iron rust off the cable, I was sent over with the negro to scrape the ship's side in the blazing sun. I went, feeling very hard done by; but presently the fine dry dust of coal tar which I scraped off the planks stuck to my sweating face and began to blister it, just as a mustard-plaster would have done.