Living Silver 



the two firemen and even the engineers, all of whom were paid 

 in wages and perqs (liver money, etc.), and did not share in the 

 profit of the cruise. But the mate was a shareman and, though 

 very young, he somehow managed to shoot and haul his own gear, 

 to pack his basket with line and repair the frayed parts. And after 

 all that was done, he stowed the fish in the hold and tended to it 

 even more carefully than he would have done on a trawler. The 

 work of the men on wages, however, was made easier by the size 

 of the fish that were caught by the great lines - fish that were 

 strong enough and fast enough to escape a racing trawl. A single 

 large halibut might represent more than a whole case of a trawler's 

 cod or haddock, more money, more weight, a higher proportion 

 of the total catch. But it was much easier to gut the single fish 

 than the hundred or so present in a box of small gadoids. 



Jan was so comfortable in his sense of home-coming that, at 

 first, he did not notice how strenuous the work was. By nightfall 

 on his second day of fishing, however, he began to feel oppressively 

 conscious of the fact that he had had only one and a half hours' 

 sleep in thirty six hours. Just after the last dahn had gone over, 

 Radcliffe had shouted aft that they were going to tide for an hour 

 or so. The whole crew had made for their bunks . Only RadclifFe 

 himself had stayed awake in the wheelhouse. And that was what 

 was worrying Jan even more than his own fatigue. Radcliffe had 

 not slept at all, not even for one and a half hours, yet he seemed 

 to have no intention of tiding on this, the second night. And he 

 did not appear to be tired, nor did anybody else aboard the Honor. 

 They were all tacitly agreed that one and a half hours' sleep every 

 second night was quite good enough for linermen. This, Jan sur- 

 mised, was how they earned their social prestige. 



He had been a little pessimistic. When he counted it up at the 

 end of the trip, he found that, during the ten days they spent in 

 fishing, he managed fifteen hours' sleep. When Radclifie slept, if 

 RadclifFe slept, Jan could never discover. He always seemed to be 

 awake. He never showed any sign of fatigue, his slow spare move- 

 ments continuing unchanged to the end of the trip. Perhaps his 



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