She carried seventy-four guns, was easily obedient to her swift sail, and had a reputation for gallantry.

From the first hour on board, Dyck Calhoun had fitted in; with a discerning eye he had understood the seamen's needs and the weaknesses of the system.
The months he had spent between his exit from prison and his entrance into the Ariadne had roughened, though not coarsened, his outward appearance.

From his first appearance among the seamen he had set himself to become their leader.

His enlistment was for three years, and he meant that these three should prove the final success of this naval enterprise, or the stark period in a calendar of tragedy.
The life of the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the hideous stench of the bilge-water--all this could in one sense be no worse than his sufferings in jail.

In spite of self-control, jail had been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation of his manhood.
He had suffered cold, dampness, fever, and indigestion there, and it had sapped the fresh fibre of life in him.