I don't believe, either, we were out of sight of land once during the progress of the voyage; for, the skipper, like the commanders of most coasting craft, hugged the shore in navigating to and fro between the different places for which he was bound, never losing sight of one prominent landmark or headland till he could distinguish the next beyond, in the day-time, and steering by the lighthouses and floating beacons, by night.
If times had been easy for us so far, when we arrived at Newcastle we had terrible work to balance our good fortune in this respect.
Talk of galley slaves! no unfortunate criminals chained to the oar in the old days of that aquatic mode of punishment ever went through half what poor Tom and I did at this great coal centre of the north--none at least could have suffered so much in body and spirit from the effects of a form of toil, to which the ordinary labour of a negro slave on a Cuban plantation would be as nothing! The skipper never allowed us once to leave the vessel to go ashore, although all the other hands went backwards from brig to land as it seemed to please them, without any restraint being apparently put on their movements; but, whether our stern taskmaster was afraid of our "cutting and running" before he had his pound of flesh out of us, or whether he feared being called to account under the terms of the Merchant Shipping Act for having us on board without our names being on the brig's books as duly licensed apprentices, when he might have been subjected to a penalty, I know not.

The fact remains, that there he kept us day and night as long as we remained taking in a fresh cargo of coals.

We never once set foot on land during our stay in port.
And the work! We did not have to carry the bags of coal, as the rest of the crew did, from the wharf to the gangway of the vessel, as then we might have been seen; but we had to bear a hand over the hatches to shunt the bags down into the hold, into which we were afterwards sent with rakes and shovels to stow the rough lumps into odd holes and corners and make a smooth surface generally, until the brig was chock full to the deck-beams, when we couldn't even creep in on our hands and knees to distribute the cargo further! This job being finished, the hatches were battened down, and the brig made sail again for the south.
This time, our destination was further along the coast westwards, the collier brig proceeding to Plymouth instead of returning to our previous port of departure--a circumstance which rejoiced us both greatly, as we should not have liked to have been landed again at the place we had left: Dr Hellyer, perhaps, would have been more pleased to see us than we should have been to meet him! The wind, on our return trip, was still westerly, and consequently against us; so I had no reason to complain of any lack of instruction in seamanship on this part of the voyage.

It was "tacks and sheets"-- "mainsail haul"-- and "bout-ship"-- "down anchor" as the tide changed, and "up with it!" again, when the flood or ebb was in our favour--all the way from the Mouse Light to Beachy Head! In performing these various nautical manoeuvres, I had plenty of exercise aloft, so that my previous teaching, when I used to go down to the quay in the summer vacations on being left alone at school, stood me now in good stead; and in a little while I became really, for a lad of my years, an expert seaman, able to hand, reef, steer, and take a watch with any on board, long before we got to Plymouth! But, it was not so with Tom.
The coal business, he thought, having no turn for colliery work, was bad enough; but, when it came to have to go aloft in a gale of wind and take in sail on a dark night, with the flapping canvas trying to jerk one off the yard, Tom acknowledged that he had no stomach to be a sailor--he preferred gymnastics ashore! Although, otherwise, I had found him bold and fearless to desperation, he now evinced a nervous timidity about mounting the rigging that I didn't think he had in him.

It seemed utterly unlike the dauntless Tom of old acquaintanceship on land.
He said that he really "funked" going aloft, for it made his head swim when he looked down.