He had been promoted from the foremast on account of his predecessor having died on the passage out.

Davis was a very good seaman and up to his work; otherwise, his education being sadly deficient, as even I, a boy, could perceive, and his temper and disposition being none of the best, he was certainly not very well fitted to command those with whom he had formerly associated as an equal.
My old friend Moggridge, the boatswain, and Adze, the carpenter, completed the list of those in authority; and, besides these, must be enumerated Cuffee, the king of the cook's galley; Jake, who had been put on the muster-roll as an ordinary hand; Harry, the captain's tawny mulatto steward; and ten able seamen--the finest and strongest of all these being Jackson, a smart young Cornishman hailing from Plymouth, who stood some six feet two in his stockings and gloried in such a broad pair of shoulders that he was worth any three of the other hands put together.
To complete the description of our ship, the lower portion of our cargo, stowed in the ground tier of the hold above the dunnage, was sugar and coffee, with some odd bags of cocoa from my father's plantation to make weight; but our chief freight, fortunately for us, as you will learn later on, was rum.

The puncheons containing this were packed as tightly as possible fore and aft the ship above the heavy produce, reaching up amidships to the level of the main hatch, all the spaces between being so compactly filled in with the lighter samples of cargo that not even a cockroach could have squeezed itself in sideways.
In the waist of the vessel on the upper deck, ranged along the inside of the bulwarks on either hand, from the entrance to the cabin under the break of the poop to right away forwards just abaft the foremast, was a row of water-casks.

A couple of these had their tops sawn off lengthwise and contained several live turtle which Captain Miles was hopeful of carrying home safely in time for the next ensuing banquet at the Mansion House on lord mayor's day, an enterprising ship's chandler in the Minories having given him an order to that effect before he left England on his voyage out to the West Indies.

In a similar way, against the sides of the poop were fixed what looked at first sight to be benches for sitting down upon, but which on closer inspection I discovered to be hen-coops,--their occupants projecting their long necks and heads therefrom, in much perplexity evidently at their strange fate in being thus brought to sea; for, as was the case with myself, this was their first experience of what life on board ship was like, and the exigencies of the cabin table would most probably cause it to be their last! It was not until the fourth day after we had set sail from Grenada that I was able to note all these particulars.