ion and guidance. Most of them
were his townsmen; they had known him from babyhood. As Lindquist said
to me, his blue eyes filled with pain and rage, "I know his mudder.
When Nils ban so high, I yump him by mine knee." So it was that rage
over the pitiful fate of their dear friend fanned into flame a spark of
rebellion in the squarehead's disciplined souls, and caused them,
eventually, to leap the barriers of race and caste prejudice and make
common cause with the stiffs.

Now, I do not wish to idealize those stiffs. No use saying they were
honest workingmen kidnaped to sea. They were not. They were just what
the mates called them--dogs, scum, vile sweeps of jail and boozing-ken.
With the single exception of the shanghaied parson, there was not a
decent man in the lot. Bums and crooks, all.

These men had lived violent, lawless lives ashore. Here, at sea, the
mates hammered the fear of the Lord and the Law into them. This was
well and good. But the mates hammered too hard. They aimed to cow the
stiffs, and cow them they did. But the stiffs' fear of the afterguard
became so great they were like cornered rats. They came below after a
watch on deck with fresh marks upon their faces and bodies, and heard
little Nils moaning in his pain. And each man said to himself, "I may
be the next to get what the little squarehead got."

Misery loves company, so these stiffs naturally drew close together.
Their common hatred and fear of the afterguard fused them into a unit.
By the time we were a month at sea, the stiffs, like the squareheads,
were in a most dangerous temper, and ripe for any deviltry.

This common state of mind grew beneath my eyes, but at first I did not
see significance in it. A mutinous state of mind is a normal state of
mind in a hell-ship's foc'sle.

But a mutiny was incubating in that ship. There were men forward who
were vitally interested in bringing trouble to a head, in causing an
outbreak of violence, in fomenting an uprising of the slaves. One day,
my eyes were opened to their game.

For weeks I noticed Blackie and Boston circulating among the men during
the dog-watches. They were great whisperers, a secretive pair, and
they never spoke their minds outright before the crowd. I paid them
little attention, for I did not like them, and felt no interest in what
I thought was their gossip. It never occurred to me they were
industriously fanning the spark of revolt, suggesting revenge to