A PIER-HEAD JUMPER.

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 120, 16 November 1929, Page 12

A PIER-HEAD JUMPER.

A nautical-man giving evidence in the Supreme Court In Auckland in the Nelson street murder trial, greatly puzzled solicitors and others'by saying that on one voyage he made he was a "pler-hcad jumper." The name is a very familiar one to sailors and about the docks at Home. It means that a man Joined 'the ship at tho last moment to make up a deficiency in the stokehold crew, and that he had not time to get together even the small amount of clothing and other effects that men of that class usually own aboard ship. It means, in fact, that as the ship was drawing out of dock ("wet" dock, of course), he jumped aboard from the dock pier-head. Such accessions to the crew are generally looked on as ne'er-do-wells by the inhabitants of the fo'c'sle who signed on in' the shipping office In the usual way. They seldom have more clothes than those they • stand up in, but sailors are good-hearted folk, and will never ?eo a pal stuck, P.eople who -never travel with-

out half a dozen trunks, suitcases, aud other impedimenta could never understand bow these pier-head jumpers live through a voyage, without even a toothbrush, but sailors are a hardy race, and the men who shovel coal have reduced the matter of wardrobe to tiie irreducible minimum.