Several of the beachcombers, however, positively refused to sleep on that old hulk and told tales of night phantoms. Even the men who did sleep in those gloomy depths said they did not like the noises that they could hear on wild nights; they had their suspicions. I must admit that some of the sounds I heard on that wreck at night _did_ sound a bit uncanny. The masts were still standing, and on the yards hung the tattered rigging and rotting canvas. When the wind blew, even slightly, on hot nights, the rigging wailed. It would sound just like children crying in the night up there aloft. If the moon was out you could see shadows flitting across the grey sails and figures clinging to the moonlit rigging. These things made those superstitious shellbacks swear that the hulk was haunted at times by her old crew.
“I know, I know,” said one old fellow to me. “They comes back, climbs aloft and sings their old sea-chanteys, all out of their ’ere graves; that’s what it is.”
As those rough men became involved in a good deal that concerns my reminiscences, I will bring the reader into closer touch with them. As they crept up on to the deck, after a sound night’s rest, they would yawn and gaze about them, and then stare at the blue sky. Possibly they were thankful to be alive, maybe had just said their prayers. “No fear,” I hear you say. Well, it is faithfully recorded in the annals of beachcomberism that two or three of those sinful old shellbacks knelt by their bunks every night—and said their prayers.
Passing down the plank gangway in single file to the sands, they made a bee-line for the Alpha and Omega of their existence—Ranjo’s grog shanty. In that low-roofed saloon of the Southern Seas they sat enthroned on salt-beef tubs. Smoking their corn-cob pipes, they chewed plug tobacco, and proceeded religiously with their toilet—that is to say, one little small-tooth comb was handed around and each one combed his hair and tangled whiskers. One could search the world over and never sight so perfect a set of noble-looking vagabonds. Each one seemed some wonderful figurehead, some symbolical, living representative of a nation’s typical emotion and crimes. They were far from being bad men, notwithstanding their twinkling eyes and grog-blossomed nasal organs. I’m not going into details over their birth and the university they honoured. I know nothing about their lost opportunities; only one thing am I certain of—they were once boys. And, believe me, the boy, in a beautiful sense, still laughed and looked through their wicked eyes. Though dead for years, the boy’s ghost still lived, and shed tears when the chill came as hope ran high. It did the same childish things—gave away the last shilling when it should have been kept; and ah! how many more ridiculous, boyish deeds. They were, in short, the world’s worst men, and, as one knows, the world’s worst men have virtues that are undreamed of in the hearts of the world’s best men.