From the whaleboat, up the low side of the _Arangi_, and over her six- inch rail of teak to her teak deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin made it easily with Jerry still under his arm.

The deck was cluttered with an exciting crowd.

Exciting the crowd would have been to untravelled humans of civilization, and exciting it was to Jerry; although to Tom Haggin and Captain Van Horn it was a mere commonplace of everyday life.
The deck was small because the _Arangi_ was small.

Originally a teak- built, gentleman's yacht, brass-fitted, copper-fastened, angle-ironed, sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze, she had been sold into the Solomon Islands' trade for the purpose of blackbirding or nigger-running.

Under the law, however, this traffic was dignified by being called "recruiting." The _Arangi_ was a labour-recruit ship that carried the new-caught, cannibal blacks from remote islands to labour on the new plantations where white men turned dank and pestilential swamp and jungle into rich and stately cocoanut groves.