e meant to sail all the way from the
Tiberside water-front of Rome to Carthage. This amazed me. And not
unnaturally. For we Romans generally dislike or even abhor the sea and
sail it as little as possible, making our journeys as much as we can by
land and as little as may be by water, choosing any detour by land which
will shorten what crossings of the sea cannot be avoided.

Among the few Romans whom I have known who enjoy sea voyages I count
myself. Of all of them Nonius outclassed the rest. He worshiped the water
and was happiest when afloat and well out to sea. He told me that he had
spent more money on his private yacht than on any of his residences, and,
when I saw her, I believed him. A larger, better designed, better
equipped, better manned, better supplied, better appointed private yacht I
never beheld. His rowers kept perfect time and made top speed all down the
Tiber, her crew set sail like man-of-warsmen, her officers were pattern
seamen and got the very most speed on their way from every condition of
wind and weather. Rufius and Clatenna, while not as good sailors as Nonius
and I, were notably good sailors and we had a very pleasant voyage until
we were almost in sight of Carthage. Then we encountered a really terrific
storm.

Now I am not going into any details of our disaster. I do not know whether
all writers of memoirs get shipwrecked or all survivors of shipwrecks
write reminiscences, but I am certain that of all the countless memoirs I
have read in the course of my life, ninety-nine out of every hundred
contained one or more accounts of shipwrecks, narrated with the minutest
detail and dwelling on the horrors, agonies, miseries, fears, discomforts
and uncertainties of the survivors and narrators with every circumstance
calculated to harrow up their readers' feelings. I could write a similar
meticulous narrative of my only shipwreck, and it was sufficiently
uncomfortable, terrifying, ghastly and hideous to glut a reader as greedy
of horrors as could be, but I am going to pass over it as lightly as
possible and summarize it as briefly as I may.

Suffice it to set down here that we were not driven on any rock or reef or
shoal nor did we collide with any other ship. Laboring heavily in the open
sea, straining on the crests and wallowing in the troughs of the
stupendous billows, the yacht, even as carefully built a yacht as Libo's,
began to leak appallingly, the inrush of the water surpassed the utmost
c