He was an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on
his face. He had been shipped in a hurry in Shanghai, that trip when
the second officer brought from home had delayed the ship three hours
in port by contriving (in some manner Captain MacWhirr could never
understand) to fall overboard into an empty coal-lighter lying
alongside, and had to be sent ashore to the hospital with concussion of
the brain and a broken limb or two.

Jukes was not discouraged by the unsympathetic sound. "The Chinamen must
be having a lovely time of it down there," he said. "It's lucky for them
the old girl has the easiest roll of any ship I've ever been in. There
now! This one wasn't so bad."

"You wait," snarled the second mate.

With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he
always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was concise in
his speech to the point of rudeness. All his time off duty he spent
in his cabin with the door shut, keeping so still in there that he was
supposed to fall asleep as soon as he had disappeared; but the man who
came in to wake him for his watch on deck would invariably find him with
his eyes wide open, flat on his back in the bunk, and glaring irritably
from a soiled pillow. He never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope
for news from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention
West Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection
with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house. He was one of those
men who are picked up at need in the ports of the world. They are
competent enough, appear hopelessly hard up, show no evidence of any
sort of vice, and carry about them all the signs of manifest failure.