Frederick William Wallace, "Wooden Ships and Iron Men" (1924), p. 176:

"A 'Paddy Wester' was an impostor, a fake seaman 'traveling in a dead man's discharge.' The name originated with one Paddy West, who kept a sailors' boarding-house and 'seaman's college' at Liverpool back in the old days. West had a ship's wheel rigged up in his back yard, and he would take aspiring recruits for seamen's berths and show them how to steer at this wheel. Practice in going aloft and furlong sail was given by having the pupils nip up to the attic and make the window-blind fast. Then the candidates for Able Seamen's berths were made to march three times around a table on which was a bullock's horn, a ritual which Paddy explained was necessary if a man would speak the truth when the mate asked questions. 'And if he asks ye where ye've been, boys, ye kin tell him, widout the word of a lie, that ye've been around the Horn three times, but ye don't need to tell him it was a bullock's horn. After a few days of such teaching, the passed candidate was rigged out in a well-worn dungaree suit, his hands were stained with tar, and with a sheath-knife around his waist on a plaited rope-yarn, and a dead man's discharge in his pocket, he was shipped in all his colossal ignorance aboard some ship as an Able-bodied Seaman, Paddy West taking the whole of the man's advance pay as his fee."