The sails overhead seemed to obey the word of command of their own accord.

The boatswain's whistle seemed to act upon the men like electricity.

The seamen's cabins, six feet long by six feet broad, in which a hammock, locker, and lashing apparatus were conveniently stowed, were something very different from the accommodation on board the pinnace.

These things were regarded by Fritz and Jack with great interest; and nowhere is the genius of man so brilliantly displayed as on board a well-appointed ship of war.
The young men, however, when they sat down to dinner in the captain's cabin, and beheld a long table flanked with cushioned seats, commanded at each end by arm-chairs, the side-board plentifully garnished with plate and crystal of various kinds, fastened with copper nails to prevent damage from the ship's pitching, they did not reflect that they were in the crater of a volcano, and that two paces from where they sat there was powder enough to blow the ship and all its crew up into the air.
They were likewise highly amused by the perpetual "guessing," "calculating," "reckoning," and inexhaustible curiosity of the crew; but their admiration of the ship, her guns, her stores, and her tackle, were boundless; they felt that their pinnace was a mere toy in comparison.

The urbanity of the officers also was a source of much gratification to them; Jack even declared that all the civilization of Europe had been shipped on board the _Hoboken_, and in so far as that was concerned, they had no occasion to go on much further.
The object of this expedition, however, was a surgeon.