The next morning, at cock-crow, they started another very similar job, taking in slops and stores of provisions from the victualling yard. This time the deck was littered with bundles of clothing done up in sacking, bags of flour, boxes and cases containing boots, shoes, straw hats, caps, biscuits, condensed milk, tea, coffee, chocolate, jam, preserved meat, tinned salmon and rabbit, mustard, pepper, salt, raisins, rice, dried beans and peas, pickles, suet, compressed vegetables, oatmeal, split peas, celery-seed for flavouring pea-soup, soap, and tobacco. There were also casks or drums of rum, vinegar, and sugar. The total consignment ran into well over a hundred tons dead weight, and all the hundred and one different articles had to be hoisted on board, sorted out, transported, and stowed in their proper storerooms.
The ship's steward and his assistant 'dusty boys' had a very busy day. Quite early in the proceedings a flour-bag burst like a shell and deluged the steward with its contents. He was powdered from head to foot, and remained so for the rest of the day; and the little runnels of perspiration running down his whitened face made a strange criss-cross pattern which transformed his ordinarily rubicund countenance into a very fair representation of a map of the planet Mars, with all the canals clearly marked. His appearance caused titters of amusement and howls of derisive merriment when his back was turned, as, armed with an enormous note-book and a sheaf of coloured pencils, he flitted in and out of the piles of boxes and packing-cases like a lost soul. He was endeavouring to trace odd cases of raisins, or errant boxes of jam or pickles, and looked very worried, poor man! At any rate, it was hardly safe to talk to him, for finding the mislaid things among the heaps of barrels, drums, cases, and boxes, which covered the deck in places to a height of fully five feet, was for the time being rather like searching for a pebble on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
The _Belligerent_ was a 'Pompey'[7] ship. Many of her officers and men had their homes in or near the port, so the 'funny party'--otherwise the ship's concert troupe--prevailed upon the first lieutenant, their honorary president, to petition the commander for permission to give a farewell entertainment on board the evening before they sailed to rejoin the squadron.