d mysteriously, but a child might have
known he spoke of the captain.

"E's a foreigner."

He regarded me doubtfully for a time, and at last decided for the sake
of lucidity to clench the matter.

"That's what E is--a DAGO!"

He nodded like a man who gives a last tap to a nail, and I could see
he considered his remark well and truly laid. His face, though still
resolute, became as tranquil and uneventful as a huge hall after a
public meeting has dispersed out of it, and finally he closed and locked
it with his pipe.

"Roumanian Jew, isn't he?" I said.

He nodded darkly and almost forbiddingly.

More would have been too much. The thing was said. But from that time
forth I knew I could depend upon him and that he and I were friends. It
happens I never did have to depend upon him, but that does not affect
our relationship.

Forward the crew lived lives very much after the fashion of ours, more
crowded, more cramped and dirty, wetter, steamier, more verminous. The
coarse food they had was still not so coarse but that they did not think
they were living "like fighting cocks." So far as I could make out
they were all nearly destitute men; hardly any of them had a proper
sea outfit, and what small possessions they had were a source of mutual
distrust. And as we pitched and floundered southward they gambled and
fought, were brutal to one another, argued and wrangled loudly, until we
protested at the uproar.

There's no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw it.
The romance is in the mind of the landsman dreamer. These brigs and
schooners and brigantines that still stand out from every little port
are relics from an age of petty trade, as rotten and obsolescent as
a Georgian house that has sunken into a slum. They are indeed just
floating fragments of slum, much as icebergs are floating fragments of
glacier. The civilised man who has learnt to wash, who has developed
a sense of physical honour, of cleanly temperate feeding, of time, can
endure them no more. They pass, and the clanking coal-wasting steamers
will follow them, giving place to cleaner, finer things....

But so it was I made my voyage to Africa, and came at last into a world
of steamy fogs and a hot smell of vegetable decay, and into sound and
sight of surf and distant intermittent glimpses of the coast. I lived
a strange concentrated life through all that time, such a life as a
creature must do that has fallen in a well. All my former wa