
Mature
The Promotion of the Admiral and Other Sea Comedies
By Will Levington ComfortLength5h 45m
About this audiobook
Excerpt: "Mr. Smith, who ran a sailors' boarding-house in that part of San Francisco known as the Barbary Coast, was absolutely sui generis. If any drunken scallawag of a scholar, who had drifted ashore on his boarding-house mud-flats, had ventured in a moment of alcoholic reminiscence to say so in the classic tongue, Shanghai Smith would have "laid him out cold" with anything handy, from a stone-ware match-box to an empty bottle. But if that same son of culture had used his mother tongue, as altered for popular use in the West, and had murmured: "Jerusalem but Mr. Smith's the daisy of all!" Smith would have thrown out his chest and blown through his teeth a windy oath and guessed he was just so. "Say it and mean it, that's me," said Smith. "I'm all right. But call me hog and I am hog; don't you forget it!" Apparently all the world called him "hog." For that he was no better than one, whether he walked, or ate, or drank, or slept, was obvious to any sailor with an open eye. But he was hard and rough and tough, and had the bull-headed courage of a mad steer combined with the wicked cunning of a monkey. "Don't never play upon me," he said often. "For 'get even' is my motter. There ain't many walkin' this earth that can say they bested me, not from the time I left Bristol in the old dart till now, when I'm known the wide world over." So far as ships and sailormen were concerned he certainly spoke the truth. He was talked of with curses in the Pacific from the Prybiloffs to the Horn, from San Francisco to Zanzibar. It was long odds at any given time in any longitude that some seaman was engaged in blaspheming Shanghai Smith for sending him on board drunk and without a chest, and with nothing better to propitiate his new shipmates with than a bottle of vinegar and water that looked like rum till it was tasted. Every breeze that blew, trade wind or monsoon, had heard of his iniquities. He got the best of every one."
Audiobook details
GenreGeneral Fiction, Literary Classics
Length5 hrs 45 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateDec 30, 2022
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1THE PROMOTION OF THE ADMIRAL.
5THE REHABILITATION OF THE VIGIA.
2THE SETTLEMENT WITH SHANGHAI SMITH.
6THREE IN A GAME.
3THE POLICY OF THE POTLUCK.
7THE MAN FROM ABO
4THE CREW OF THE KAMMA FUNDER.
8THE SCUTTLING OF THE PANDORA.