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The whole length of the hold , from stem to stern , was floored off level , and we began with raising a pile in the after part , hard against the bulkhead of the run , and filling it up to the beams , crowding in as many as we could by hand and pushing in with oars ; when a large " book " was made of from twenty-five to fifty hides , doubled at the backs , and put into one another , like the leaves of a book . This sudden turn , for which we were so little prepared , was as unacceptable to me as to any of the rest ; for I had been troubled for several days with a slight tooth-ache , and this cold weather , and wetting and freezing , were not the best things in the world for it . Many things which , while I was reading , I had a misgiving about , thinking them above their capacity , I was surprised to find them enter into completely . During the first two days , we made sail for these puffs , shaking the reefs out of the topsails and boarding the tacks of the courses ; but finding that it only made work for us when the gale set in again , it was soon given up , and we lay-to under our close-reefs . The next day , the California commenced unloading her cargo ; and her boats ' crews , in coming and going , sang their boat-songs , keeping time with their oars . In addition to these , they had picked up at the theatres and other places a few songs of a little more genteel cast , which they were very proud of ; and I shall never forget hearing an old salt , who had broken his voice by hard drinking on shore , and bellowing from the mast-head in a hundred north-westers , with all manner of ungovernable trills and quavers - in the high notes , breaking into a rough falsetto - and in the low ones , growling along like the dying away of the boatswain 's " all hands ahoy ! One of the green-hands was a Boston boy , from one of the public schools , and , of course , knew many things which we wished to ask about , and on inquiring the names of our two Boston boys , found that they had been schoolmates of his . In the midst of all this , and before it became dark , we had all the studding-sails to make up and stow away , and then to lay aloft and rig in all the booms , fore and aft , and coil away the tacks , sheets , and halyards . And so irritated and impatient had the crew become , that even this proposition , which was open mutiny , punishable with state prison , was entertained , and the carpenter went to his berth , leaving it tacitly understood that something serious would be done , if things remained as they were many hours longer . Fortunately a sailor , not being a free agent in work aboard ship , is not accountable ; yet the fact of being constantly employed , without thought , in such things , begets an indifference to the rights of others . Round this we sat , attacking it with our jack-knives and teeth , and with the appetite of young lions , and sent back an empty kid to the galley .