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She was tolerably well crowded with human beings, carrying a large number of passengers in the cuddy and steerage, and some thirty or forty people in the ’tween decks. The poop was sheltered by an awning, and under it, seated on chairs or lounging upon the skylights and the hencoops, were such of the passengers as were privileged to use that portion of the decks, reading, talking, smoking, casting languid eyes upon the breathless ocean; ladies fanning themselves, gentlemen in the airiest possible costumes, and at the extremity of the shadowed deck the steersman grasping the wheel, his figure in the pouring vertical sunshine rising and falling against the rich sapphire of the tropical heavens with the swaying of the ship, and the brilliant brass of the binnacle-hood flashing into flames as it slowly lifted and sank under the eye of the burning luminary.

The quarter-deck was partially sheltered by the folds of the mainsail, which hung from the great yard in the grip of the leechlines; and there, wherever the shadows rested, congregated the steerage and ’tween-deck passengers, lolling red-faced and open-breasted. In one place a knot of women with children gathered about them, in another a number of men in their shirt-sleeves sprawling in many postures, and, forward, glimpses of Jack could be caught at work at some job in the waist, or on the forecastle, or in the shadow of the break of his big parlour, or popping his head through the scuttle with a sooty inverted pipe between his teeth to have a look around him, or enjoying a wash-down, stripped to the hips, in a bucket of salt water, screened from the passengers’ eyes by the galley; while the live stock in the long boat filled the air that way with rumbling and squeaking noises, which harmonized with the hoarse pipes of the boatswain standing betwixt the knightheads and bawling instructions to a couple of ordinary seamen on the foretopsail-yard.