The navigator, Christopher Colomb, had just married a young and pretty wife, and did not spend more time on board than he could possibly help. As a consequence, his messmates saw comparatively little of him, unless the _Belligerent_ was cruising, and Mrs Colomb could not follow her husband. The captain occasionally succeeded in getting him to play golf in the afternoons; but Colomb preferred his wife's society to that of any one else. When he was on board in the evenings he shut himself in his cabin, and spent the time writing a learned treatise on _Magnetic Influences at Sea_. The book is still being written.
Peter Wooten, the next senior non-specialist officer of the military branch, was doing a two-year spell in a battleship, after having been in command of destroyers and gunboats for the past six years. He hated the drudgery of big-ship life, where he acted as the commander's understudy on the upper deck, had charge of the midshipmen and their instruction, arranged the ordinary seamen's training classes, worked the derrick for hoisting in and out boats, and generally acted as a sort of 'odd job' man. The life was fairly comfortable, it is true; but he much preferred the joys of commanding his own small ship to being a comparative nobody in a vessel the size of the _Belligerent_. He was a burly, deep-chested man, with fair, curly hair, tanned face, and a pair of clear, humorous blue eyes. He was fresh from China, where he had commanded a tiny river gunboat up the Yang-tse-kiang; and there, miles up the great river, far away from any admiral, and completely 'on his own,' he had made history in a small way. He was a great character, and his stories of the Chinese revolution, when he could be induced to tell them, were sometimes amusing and always interesting. (He was the commanding officer of Martin's destroyer when that ordinary seaman joined the 'black navy' soon after the outbreak of the present war, so perhaps we may be pardoned for allowing him to spin one of his yarns. It has the advantage of being true.)
'It was quite a pretty little show,' he said one evening in the smoking-room after dinner, when somebody had egged him on to talk after a second glass of port. 'Have any of you fellows ever heard of a place called Kiang-fu, up the Yang-tse? You might know it, No. 1; you're an old China bird.'