The months he had spent between his exit from prison and his entrance
into the Ariadne had roughened, though not coarsened, his outward
appearance. From his first appearance among the seamen he had set
himself to become their leader. His enlistment was for three years, and
he meant that these three should prove the final success of this naval
enterprise, or the stark period in a calendar of tragedy.

The life of the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate
pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks
that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the
hideous stench of the bilge-water--all this could in one sense be no
worse than his sufferings in jail. In spite of self-control, jail had
been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation of his manhood.

He had suffered cold, dampness, fever, and indigestion there, and it had
sapped the fresh fibre of life in him. His days in London had been
cruel. He had sought work in great commercial concerns, and had almost
been grateful when rejected. When his money was stolen, there seemed
nothing to do, as he said to Michael Clones, but to become a footpad or a
pirate. Then the stormy doors of the navy had opened wide to him; and as
many a man is tempted into folly or crime by tempestuous nature, so he,
forlorn, spiritually unkempt, but physically and mentally well-composed,
in a spirit of bravado, flung himself into the bowels of the fleet.

From the moment Dyck arrived on board the Ariadne he was a marked man.
Ferens, a disfranchised solicitor, who knew his story, spread the
unwholesome truth about him among the ship's people, and he received
attentions at once offensive and flattering. The best-educated of the
ship's hands approached him on the grievances with which the whole navy
was stirring.