Chapter 13

A CHAPTER OF PREPARATIONS--DISCRIMINATION IN CHARACTER--A TIGHT FIT,
AND OTHER CONVENIENCES, WITH SOME JUDGMENT.

I shall pass lightly over the events of the succeeding month. During
this time, the whole party were transferred to England, a proper
ship had been bought and equipped, the family of strangers were put
in quiet possession of their cabins, and I had made all ray
arrangements for being absent from England for the next two years.
The vessel was a stout-built, comfortable ship of about three
hundred tons burden, and had been properly constructed to encounter
the dangers of the ice. Her accommodations were suitably arranged to
meet all the exigencies of both monikin and human wants, the
apartments of the ladies being very properly separated from those of
the gentlemen, and otherwise rendered decorous and commodious. The
Lady Chatterissa very pleasantly called their private room the
gynecee, which, as I afterwards ascertained, was a term for the
women's apartment, obtained from the Greek, the monikins being quite
as much addicted as we are ourselves, to showing their acquirements
by the introduction of words from foreign tongues.

Noah showed great care in the selection of the ship's company, the
service being known to be arduous, and the duties of a very
responsible character. For this purpose, he made a journey expressly
to Liverpool (the ship lying in the Greenland Dock at London), where
he was fortunate enough to engage five Yankees, as many Englishmen,
two Norwegians, and a Swede, all of whom had been accustomed to
cruising as near the poles as ordinary men ever succeeded in
reaching. He was also well suited in his cook and mates; but I
observed that he had great difficulty in finding a cabin-boy to his
mind. More than twenty applicants were rejected, some for the want
of one qualification, and some for the want of another. As I was
present at several examinations of different candidates for the
office, I got a little insight into his manner of ascertaining their
respective merits.

The invariable practice was, first, to place a bottle of rum and a
pitcher of water before the lad, and to order him to try his hand at
mixing a glass of grog. Four applicants were incontinently rejected
for manifesting a natural inaptitude at hitting the juste milieu, in
this important part of the duty of a cabin-boy. Most of the
candidates, however, were reasonably expert in the art; and the
captain soon came to the next requisite, which was, to say "Sir," in
a tone, as Noah expressed it, somewhere between the snap of a steel-
trap and the mendicant whine of a beggar. Fourteen were rejected for
deficiencies on this score, the captain remarking that most of them
"were the sa'ciest