I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew,--Louis he
is called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a
very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a
listener. In the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I
was peeling the everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into the galley
for a "yarn." His excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk
when he signed. He assured me again and again that it was the last
thing in the world he would dream of doing in a sober moment. It
seems that he has been seal-hunting regularly each season for a
dozen years, and is accounted one of the two or three very best
boat-steerers in both fleets.

"Ah, my boy," he shook his head ominously at me, "'tis the worst
schooner ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was
I. 'Tis sealin' is the sailor's paradise--on other ships than
this. The mate was the first, but mark me words, there'll be more
dead men before the trip is done with. Hist, now, between you an'
meself and the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a regular
devil, an' the Ghost'll be a hell-ship like she's always ben since
he had hold iv her. Don't I know? Don't I know? Don't I remember
him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an' shot four iv
his men? Wasn't I a-layin' on the Emma L., not three hundred yards
away? An' there was a man the same year he killed with a blow iv
his fist. Yes, sir, killed 'im dead-oh. His head must iv smashed
like an eggshell. An' wasn't there the Governor of Kura Island,
an' the Chief iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an' didn't they
come aboard the Ghost as his guests, a-bringin' their wives along--
wee an' pretty little bits of things like you see 'em painted on
fans. An' as he was a-gettin' under way, didn't the fond husbands