ing of a cork, reached his
ears from the interior of the house; and when the port watch was
relieved at midnight, Huish and the captain appeared upon the
quarter-deck with flushed faces and uneven steps, the former laden with
bottles, the latter with two tin mugs. Herrick silently passed them by.
They hailed him in thick voices, he made no answer; they cursed him for
a churl, he paid no heed although his belly quivered with disgust and
rage. He closed-to the door of the house behind him, and cast himself on
a locker in the cabin--not to sleep, he thought--rather to think and to
despair. Yet he had scarce turned twice on his uneasy bed, before a
drunken voice hailed him in the ear, and he must go on deck again to
stand the morning watch.

The first evening set the model for those that were to follow. Two cases
of champagne scarce lasted the four-and-twenty hours, and almost the
whole was drunk by Huish and the captain. Huish seemed to thrive on the
excess; he was never sober, yet never wholly tipsy; the food and the sea
air had soon healed him of his disease, and he began to lay on flesh.
But with Davis things went worse. In the drooping, unbuttoned figure
that sprawled all day upon the lockers, tippling and reading novels; in
the fool who made of the evening watch a public carouse on the
quarter-deck, it would have been hard to recognise the vigorous seaman
of Papeete roads. He kept himself reasonably well in hand till he had
taken the sun and yawned and blotted through his calculations; but from
the moment he rolled up the chart, his hours were passed in slavish
self-indulgence or in hoggish slumber. Every other branch of his duty
was neglected, except maintaining a stern discipline about the
dinner-table. Again and again Herrick would hear the cook called aft,
and see him running with fresh tins, or carrying away again a meal that
had been totally condemned. And the more the captain became sunk in
drunkenness, the more delicate his palate showed itself. Once, in the
forenoon, he had a bo'sun's chair rigged over the rail, stripped to his
trousers, and went overboard with a pot of paint. "I don't like the way
this schooner's painted," said he, "and I've taken a down upon her
name." But he tired of it in half an hour, and the schooner went on her
way with an incongruous patch of colour on the stern, and the word
_Farallone_ part obliterated and part looking through. He refused to
stand either the middle or morning watch.