all of us; for it was our unanimous conviction that no man less fitted
for the sea had ever embarked on it. But to sea he had come. After a
week's stay in a sailors' boarding-house, he had been shoved aboard of us
as an able seaman.

All hands had to do his work for him. Not only did he know nothing, but
he proved himself unable to learn anything. Try as they would, they
could never teach him to steer. To him the compass must have been a
profound and awful whirligig. He never mastered its cardinal points,
much less the checking and steadying of the ship on her course. He never
did come to know whether ropes should be coiled from left to right or
from right to left. It was mentally impossible for him to learn the easy
muscular trick of throwing his weight on a rope in pulling and hauling.
The simplest knots and turns were beyond his comprehension, while he was
mortally afraid of going aloft. Bullied by captain and mate, he was one
day forced aloft. He managed to get underneath the crosstrees, and there
he froze to the ratlines. Two sailors had to go after him to help him
down.

All of which was bad enough had there been no worse. But he was vicious,
malignant, dirty, and without common decency. He was a tall, powerful
man, and he fought with everybody. And there was no fairness in his
fighting. His first fight on board, the first day out, was with me, when
he, desiring to cut a plug of chewing tobacco, took my personal table-
knife for the purpose, and whereupon, I, on a hair-trigger, promptly
exploded. After that he fought with nearly every member of the crew.
When his clothing became too filthy to be bearable by the rest of us, we
put it to soak and stood over him while he washed it. In short, the
Bricklayer was one of those horrible and monstrous things that one must
see in order to be convinced that they exist.