ckers and servant's bells. There had been
a futile attempt at an area. The passenger saloon was on the upper deck,
and had a tile roof. To this humplike structure the ship owed her name.
Her designer had erected several churches--that of St. Ignotus is still
used as a brewery in Hotbath Meadows--and, possessed of the ecclesiastic
idea, had given the _Camel_ a transept; but, finding this impeded her
passage through the water, he had it removed. This weakened the vessel
amidships. The mainmast was something like a steeple. It had a
weathercock. From this spire the eye commanded one of the finest views
in England.

Such was the _Camel_ when I joined her in 1864 for a voyage of discovery
to the South Pole. The expedition was under the "auspices" of the Royal
Society for the Promotion of Fair Play. At a meeting of this excellent
association, it had been "resolved" that the partiality of science for
the North Pole was an invidious distinction between two objects equally
meritorious; that Nature had marked her disapproval of it in the case of
Sir John Franklin and many of his imitators; that it served them very
well right; that this enterprise should be undertaken as a protest
against the spirit of undue bias; and, finally, that no part of the
responsibility or expense should devolve upon the society in its
corporate character, but any individual member might contribute to the
fund if he were fool enough. It is only common justice to say that none
of them was. The _Camel_ merely parted her cable one day while I
happened to be on board--drifted out of the harbor southward, followed
by the execrations of all who knew her, and could not get back. In two
months she had crossed the equator, and the heat began to grow
insupportable.

Suddenly we were becalmed. There had been a fine breeze up to three
o'clock in the afternoon and the ship had made as much as two knots an
hour when without a word of warning the sails began to belly the wrong
way, owing to the impetus that the ship had acquired; and then, as this
expired, they hung as limp and lifeless as the skirts of a clawhammer
coat. The _Camel_ not only stood stock still but moved a little backward
toward England. Old Ben the boatswain said that he'd never knowed but
one deader calm, and that, he explained, was when Preacher Jack, the
reformed sailor, had got excited in a sermon in a seaman's chapel and
shouted that the Archangel Michael would chuck the Dragon into the brig
and