"Pig-Headed" Sailor Men, by Louis Becke

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Title: "Pig-Headed" Sailor Men From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other Stories" - 1902

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24954]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Produced by David Widger

"PIG-HEADED" SAILOR MEN

By Louis Becke

T. FISHER UNWIN, 1902

LONDON

Crossing from Holyhead to Ireland one night the captain of the steamer and myself, during an hour's talk on the bridge, found that we each had sailed in a certain Australian coasting steamer more than twenty years before--he as chief officer and I as passenger; and her shipwreck one Christmas Eye (long after), which was attended by an appalling loss of life, led us to talk of "pig-headed" skippers generally. His experiences were large, and some of his stories were terrible even to hear, others were grotesquely humorous, and the memory of that particularly pleasant passage across a sea as smooth as a mill pond, has impelled me to retell some of the incidents I related to him of my own adventures with obstinate, self-willed, or incapable captains.

My first experience was with a gentleman of the "incapable" variety, and befell me when

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