he mate about making
port, and, counting upon my sympathy, had prevailed upon the others
forward to insist upon it. Well, you know the feeling of an officer up
against mutiny. No matter what the provocation, he must put the mutiny
down; so, when the men came aft, they found me with the mate, and dead
against them. We called their bluff, drove them forward at the muzzles
of our guns, and promised them relief from all work except handling
sail if they would take the ship to Queenstown. They agreed, because
they could not do anything else, and the mutiny was over. But my
conscience bothered me later on; for if I had joined them, some lives
might have been saved. Even though the mate was a big, courageous
Irish-American half again as heavy as myself, he could not have held
out against me with the crew at my back. But, you see, it would have
been mutiny, and mutiny spells with a big M to a man that knows the
law.

"Before we reached the Bay of Biscay every man forward, including the
carpenter, sailmaker, and steward, had been bitten, either by a mad rat
or a mad shipmate, and was more or less along on the way to convulsions
and death. The decks, rails, and rigging, the tops, crosstrees, and
yards, swarmed with rats darting along aimlessly biting each other, and
going on, frothing at their little mouths, and squeaking in pain. By
this time all thought of handling the ship was gone from us. The mate
and I took turns at steering, and keeping our eyes open for a sail. But
a curious thing about that passage is that from the time we dropped the
Farallones, off 'Frisco, we did not speak a single craft in all that
long four months of sailing. Once in a while a steamer's smoke would
show up on the horizon, and again a speck that might be a sail would
heave in sight for an hour or so; but nothing came near us.

"The mate and I began to quarrel. We had heeled ourselves with pistols
against a possible assault of some frenzied sailor, but there was
strong chance that we might use these playthings on each other. I
upbraided the mate for not putting in to St.-Louis, and he got back at
me for advising him against putting in to Montevideo. It was not an
even argument, for the first sailor had not been bitten at the time I
advised him. But it resulted in bad feeling between us. We kept our
tempers, however, and kept the maddened men away from us until they
died, one by one; then, with the wheel in beckets, and the ship
steering herself befo