Thanks Gibb. I reckon the truth is stranger than fiction and funnier than comedy. Massett is innocent. I totally missed this paragraph right before The seamen as usual....

“The peculiar hurry and scurry on board a New York and London Packet Ship in olden times*, is so happily hit off by one whose name I have forgotten, that I am tempted to transcribe it from some manuscript notes I have by me....”

*fwiw: All of the above appears in Chapter I “My First Voyage.” Per Massett, in the summer of 1837 on the “Hampton,” Capt. David Balderston, out of London.