Jack (Tom Saunders), on his first passage as apprentice to Bramble the pilot, listens to a seamen's yarn - a ghost story of a merchantman haunted by a cat - in the forepeak of the West Indiaman that they have brought down the Thames to Sheerness. Two of the crew are sitting on a sea chest, a third on a folded sail on the deck, the fourth on a coil of rope. Two blocks and a buoy lie by them, with rope-working tools in the rack to the right and a lantern and hammock hanging from the deckhead.

This is one of a group of five original drawings for Marryat's 'Poor Jack' (1840) - in which the engraving faces p. 156 in Chapter XXII - all bequeathed to the Museum in 1953 by Edward William Marry Myerstein. This one is accompanied by a handwritten note in ink, perhaps once on a frame but now preserved in the mount, following conservation of the group in 1972: 'This drawing was made by my late father Clarkson Stanfield as an illustration for his friend Captain Marryat's " Poor Jack" the subject the "Forepeak Yarn" [signed] George C. Stanfield [dated] 18th February 1874'. The other four drawings are PAF6067 and PAF6069-71. Although similar notes for these are not present, they were almost certainly preserved as a group of some of the lesser illustrations for the book.

George Clarkson Stanfield was less successful as a painter than his father and died in reduced circumstances in 1878, aged 49. He may have sold rather than just authenticated them in 1874. Marryat (d. 1848) is known to have had others in his house at Langham, Norfolk, but which and how many are unknown and none of these have yet been located.