the sailor told me the story. I
do not tell it as he told it to me because of the oaths that were in
it; nor is it from delicacy that I refrain from writing these oaths
verbatim, but merely because the horror they caused in me at the time
troubles me still whenever I put them on paper, and I continue to
shudder until I have blotted them out. Therefore, I tell the story in
my own words, which, if they possess a certain decency that was not in
the mouth of that sailor, unfortunately do not smack, as his did, of
rum and blood and the sea.

You would take a ship to be a dead thing like a table, as dead as bits
of iron and canvas and wood. That is because you always live on shore,
and have never seen the sea, and drink milk. Milk is a more accursed
drink than water.

What with the captain and what with the man at the wheel, and what
with the crew, a ship has no fair chance of showing a will of her own.

There is only one moment in the history of ships, that carry crews on
board, when they act by their own free will. This moment comes when
all the crew are drunk. As the last man falls drunk on to the deck,
the ship is free of man, and immediately slips away. She slips away at
once on a new course and is never one yard out in a hundred miles.

It was like this one night with the Sea-Fancy. Bill Smiles was there
himself, and can vouch for it. Bill Smiles has never told this tale
before for fear that anyone should call him a liar. Nobody dislikes
being hung as much as Bill Smiles would, but he won't be called a
liar. I tell the tale as I heard it, relevancies and irrelevancies,
though in my more decent words; and as I made no doubts of the truth
of it then, I hardly like to now; others can please themselves.

It is not often that the whole of a crew is drunk. The crew of the
Sea-Fancy was no drunkener than others. It happened like this.

The captain was always drunk. One day a fancy he had that some spiders
were plotting against him, or a sudden bleeding he had from both his
ears, made him think that drinking might be bad for his health. Next
day he signed the pledge. He was sober all that morning and all the
afternoon, but at evening he saw a sailor drinking a a glass of beer,
and a fit of madness seized him, and he said things that seemed bad to
Bill Smiles. And next morning he made all of them take the pledge.

For two days nobody had a drop to drink, unless you count water, and
on the third morning the captain was qu