OF THE SOUTH SEAS 167 



Steve Drinkwater, a Dutchman; and Alex Simoneau, 

 a French- Canadian of Attleboro, Massachusetts. 



"Where 's the El Dorado?" I asked of the captain. 



Again he looked at me, suspiciously. 



"She went down in thirty-one degrees: two minutes, 

 south and one hundred twenty-one: thirty-seven west," 

 he said curtly, and turned away. There was pride and 

 sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a reticence not 

 quite explicable. The three, as they stood a moment 

 before they walked off, made a striking group. Their 

 sturdy figures, in their worn and torn clothes, their 

 hairy chests, their faces framed in bushes of hair, their 

 bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters who had 

 won a battle in which it was pitch and toss if they would 

 survive, made me proud of the race of seamen the world 

 over. They are to-day almost the only followers of a 

 pruneval calling, tainted little by the dirt of profit-seek- 

 ing. They risk their lives daily in the hazards of the 

 ocean, the victims of cold-blooded insurance gamblers 

 and of niggardly owners, and rewarded with only a seat 

 in the poorhouse or a niche in Davy Jones's Locker. I 

 was once of their trade, and I longed to know the hap- 

 penings of their fated voyage. 



Next morning the three were quite ordinary-look- 

 ing. They were shorn and shaved and scrubbed, and 

 rigged out in Schlyter's white drill trousers and coats. 

 They had rooms under mine in the animal-yard. They 

 were to await the first steamship for the United States, 

 to which country they would be sent as shipwrecked 

 mariners by the American consulate. This vessel would 

 not arrive for some weeks. The captain sat outside his 

 door on the balcony, and expanded his log into a story 



