This is not the right way to spell it, but it is what the word sounds like spelt phonetically. 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.
There was a good deal of sickness on that boat, but nobody died. 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. 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.