When I woke up we were going down the river. Every available square inch of the boat was packed with steers, and to go forward you had to walk on planks over the top of the pens.

These beasts were in charge of about a dozen cattle-men, under a "capitaz" (boss). Most of them knew nothing about their work, as they were only working their passages to Europe. They slept among the fodder on the hatchways, over which a huge tarpaulin was stretched, tentwise, on a derrick pole, and lashed to the pens on either side. Others slept in odd corners all over the ship, and the first job the capitaz had to do in the morning was to root them out -no small feat ; and afterwards to drive them through the clay, as they had a strong objection to work. I had had the job of capitaz offered me, if I would wait some three weeks in Buenos Ayres, but I calculated that I should spend the twenty pounds the billet was worth before I sailed, so did not take it. Tho cattle-men were a mixed lot- Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, &c.-and their clothing was likewise mixed; one man had sewn up a sack on his body, with holes cut for his head and four limbs; another man had torn his shirt, and went bare as to one shoulder and side, all the passage.

The voyage showed some peculiar characteristics of the Latin races. The semi-clad gentleman one day was working in the lower pens, when another man, who had a grudge against him, threw a bucket of water down over him from the middle hatchway. He of the shirt leapt up, and pursued Dago No.2 over the pens with a hay-fork, making desperate hinges at the seat of his trousers with this weapon; but the quarry, bounding from pen to pen like a spring-bok, was too swift for him, and the weapon never reached its mark. The second capitaz stopped the man of wrath, and vainly remonstrated with him; but finally, on being told that he would get no dinner that day, the Dago burst into tears; indeed, all these highly-strung people seemed equally ready to knife each other or to weep at the slightest provocation.

There was only one other passenger beside myself, and we quarrelled the first week out of port, and had nothing to do with each other the rest of the four weeks' passage. We quarrelled as to whether asparagus would grow in Lancashire or not. I was not sorry for this, as I did not care for the man. He brought a large quantity of whisky on board with him, and finished it in about three days, and, as the ship's company had lapped up all the liquor she carried during their long stay at Posario, he could not get any more, and his temper was a bit ragged during the re-action. We were sitting at dinner with the captain, and the conversation turning on asparagus, I happened to remark that I had seen a blue field of it near the Blundlesands golf-links, where I used to play ; to which he replied, with a smile, that he didn't think I knew what I was talking about, as asparagus was very difficult to rear. Of course I told him that I would not take such talk from him ; he dropped his eyes, and did not reply, and the captain made some remark on the weather, and thereafter the other passenger occupied one side of the tiny deck, and the writer of this saga the other.

I spent a lot off time swapping yarns with the second capitaz, who had been trading among the Indians in Patagonia, and we often sat perched on a pen talking and smoking far into the night. By moonlight, in the still tropics, the floating farmyard looked quite tolerable. He gave me a stone about twice the size of a hen's egg, apparently formed of some calcareous substance, with a glossy surface, which he had found in the entrails of a guanaco deer, and showed me the skull of an Indian of the giant tribe called "Towelchas" by the Spaniards. This is not the right way to spell it, but it is what the word sounds like spelt phonetically. I noticed this skull had very prominent bony ridges over the brows, such as one sees on the skulls of pre-historic men, so I offered him a half-pound tin of tobacco for it, and a year later showed it at the loyal College of Surgeons in London, and it was added to the collection of natural curiosities there.

I often used to spend an hour in the galley at night, chatting, and making myself a mug of cocoa. Chips, the carpenter, sometimes came in too. He was great on natural history. One night the capitaz referred to the cattle as brutes, to which Chips objected. " Cattle eat grass." quoth he, " so are not brutes ; a lion or a dog is a brute." "Get out," said the cook ; "cattle are brutes-all animals are." " No, they're not-nothing that eats vegetables is a brute," said Chips. "Well, what do you reckon a tortoise is? " said the cook. "A tortoise is an insec'," replied Chips. "No, he isn't ; a tortoise is an animal," said the cook; "everything alive is an animal, except man." "Oh," was the reply, men are animals-you and. me are animals." "Speak for yourself," said the cook. ; "I'm not an animal." "Yes, you are, " replied Chips, " we're all animals. Man is an animal and, what's more, he is a domestic animal "

One of the mates had a kind of fever the first half of the passage, and he used to dress in his shore-going clothes and a clean shirt, and come on deck during the night, thinking he was going ashore. There was a good deal of sickness on that boat, but nobody died. A burial at sea is rather impressive ; I have attended two, not including a dummy one. when the effigy of an unpopular passenger was thrown overboard ; it looked very life-like, and several albatrosses straightway swooped down towards the dummy man in the water astern, but rose again when within twenty yards of their supposed prey.

We stayed for a night at Cape Verde Islands, and my old friends the coaling clerks gave me a first-class welcome, keeping a boat with a. crew of two niggers by the side of the jetty all night, so that I could stay till the last moment before the ship, which was anchored about half a mile out, went away just before dawn. We had a glorious night, and the end of it was that the fellow who was with me, and myself, were mobbed by an excited crowd of Africans, who accused us (so he explained to me, as of course I could not understand them) of house-breaking; but as most of them were ignorant of what the row was about, and only raged. round in an excited condition, without quite knowing what they were there for, we won our way through without mishap. He went back to his chummery, and I got to the boat that was waiting me, leaving that quarter of the town in an uproar. The details of how the shindy came to pass perhaps would not interest the reader, but we had a most enjoyable evening after the monotony of the ship.

The next few months I spent in Liverpool. One day it occurred to me to send up my name as an entrant for Sandow's great Physical Culture Competition of 1899. There were to be medals given to the three best-developed men of each county, and the winners were to compete in London for a gold statuette, valued at five hundred guineas. Physical culture in its fullest sense had always been a great hobby of mine, and for several months I worked steadily with dumb-bells, &c. I made some improvement, but not as much as might have been expected, as I had always been pretty strong. and at the age of sixteen had been able to push up a sixty-five pound bell in one hand without any previous practice of the kind, and at the same age could elevate two half hundred-weights together one in each hand. The competition was to come off about mid-summer, but in March I fell sick of typhoid fever, to which was added pneumonia, and for six weeks I lay in bed, taking nothing but milk. When I rose at the beginning of May all my past work was lost ; I looked like one of the pictures of victims of an Indian famine that appear in the Graphic and other illustrated papers from time to time. I began to train again very gradually, and the competition was for some reason postponed for a month, thus giving me a little better chance of catching up those men who had had a year's uninterrupted training. The judging of the men of my county (Staffordshire) took place on August 23rd., at the Athletic Institute, Birmingham. Mr. Sandow and two other competent men were the judges. Handicapped as I was by my late illness, I only managed to come in third.

All this time I had been sending out fresh shipments of pedigree rams ; and, as I knew little about either rams or business methods, naturally I lost money, and in two and a-half years had dropped about £600 exclusive of living expenses. I had only a few pounds left, so I resolved to try my luck in New Zealand, and within a week of that decision was watching the lights of Dover and Folkstone sliding past on our starboard side as the Orient liner, Austral, dropped down the Channel.

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 Chapter One New Zealand 1894

Chapter Two Norway 1895

Chapter Three Exporting 1896

Chapter Four Argentina & Uruguay

Chapter Six Back to New Zealand

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