Free Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) by Robert Louis Stevenson

Hands, was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman, who could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything.
    He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so the mention of his name leads me on to speak of our ship’s cook, Barbecue, as the men called him.

    It was something to see him get on with his cooking like someone safe ashore
    Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round his neck, to have both hands as free as possible. It was something to see him wedge the foot of the crutch against a bulkhead, and, propped against it, yielding to every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He had a line or two rigged up to help him across the widest spaces — Long John’s earrings, they were called — and he would hand himself from one place to another, now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet some of the men who had sailed with him before expressed their pity to see him so reduced.
    “He’s no common man, Barbecue,” said the coxswain to me. “He had good schooling in his young days, and can speak like a book when so minded; and brave — a lion’s nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple four and knock their heads together — him unarmed.”
    All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a way of talking to each, and doing everybody some particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as clean as a new pin; the dishes hanging up burnished, and his parrot in a cage in the corner.
    “Come away, Hawkins,” he would say; “come and have a yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here’s Cap’n Flint — I calls my parrot Cap’n Flint, after the famous buccaneer — here’s Cap’n Flint predicting success to our v’yage. Wasn’t you, Cap’n?”
    And the parrot would say, with great rapidity: “Pieces of eight! pieces of eight! pieces of eight!” till you wondered that it was not out of breath or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage.
    “Now, that bird,” he would say, “is, may be, two hundred years old, Hawkins — they live forever mostly, and if anybody’s seen more wickedness it must be the devil himself. She’s sailed with England — the great Cap’n England, the pirate. She’s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up of the wrecked plate ships. It’s there she learned ‘Pieces of eight,’ and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of ‘em, Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the Viceroy of the Indies out of Goa, she was, and to look at her you would think she was a babby. But you smelt powder — didn’t you, cap’n?”
    “Stand by to go about,” the parrot would scream.
    “Ah, she’s a handsome craft, she is,” the cook would say, and give her sugar from his pocket, and then the bird would peck at the bars and swear straight on, passing belief for wickedness. “There,” John would add, “you can’t touch pitch and not be mucked, lad. Here’s this poor old innocent bird of mine swearing blue fire and none the wiser, you may lay to that. She would swear the same, in a manner of speaking, before the chaplain.” And John would touch his forelock with a solemn way he had, that made me think he was the best of men.
    In the meantime the squire and Captain Smollett were still on pretty distant terms with one another. The squire made no bones about the matter; he despised the captain. The captain, on his part, never spoke but when he was spoken to, and then sharp and short and dry, and not a word wasted. He owned, when driven into a corner, that he seemed to have been wrong about the crew; that some of them were as brisk as he wanted to see, and all had behaved fairly well. As for the ship, he had