It was the
only time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some pretty bad weather
since I became a boat-builder. But that phantom smell of potatoes was
peculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every
one of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by
quap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but the
stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept
me, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical wretchedness
the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate
vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then
I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and my
keen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a proper
wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I
lacked that coat! And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worst
bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conducting
his illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera house
than a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well and breezy,
and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond as
himself, and divided his time almost equally between smoking it and
trying to clean it. "There's only three things you can clean a pipe
with," he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand. "The best's a
feather, the second's a straw, and the third's a girl's hairpin. I never
see such a ship. You can't find any of 'em. Last time I came this way
I did find hairpins anyway, and found 'em on the floor of the captain's
cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?... Feelin' better?"

At which I usually swore.

"Oh, you'll be all right soon. Don't mind my puffin' a bit? Eh?"

He never tired of asking me to "have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes you
forget it, and that's half the battle."

He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe
of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue
eye at the captain by the hour together. "Captain's a Card," he would
say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. "He'd like
to know what we're up to. He'd like to know--no end."

That did seem to be the captain's ruling idea. But he also wanted to
impress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of good family and to
air a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature, to
the English c