r. In Bombay, ignorant
landlubbers alluded to her as that "pretty grey ship." Pretty! A scurvy
meed of commendation! We knew she was the most magnificent sea-boat ever
launched. We tried to forget that, like many good sea-boats, she was
at times rather crank. She was exacting. She wanted care in loading and
handling, and no one knew exactly how much care would be enough. Such
are the imperfections of mere men! The ship knew, and sometimes would
correct the presumptuous human ignorance by the wholesome discipline
of fear. We had heard ominous stories about past voyages. The cook
(technically a seaman, but in reality no sailor)--the cook, when unstrung
by some misfortune, such as the rolling over of a saucepan, would mutter
gloomily while he wiped the floor:--"There! Look at what she has done!
Some voy'ge she will drown all hands! You'll see if she won't." To which
the steward, snatching in the galley a moment to draw breath in the
hurry of his worried life, would remark philosophically:--"Those that see
won't tell, anyhow. I don't want to see it." We derided those fears. Our
hearts went out to the old man when he pressed her hard so as to make
her hold her own, hold to every inch gained to windward; when he made
her, under reefed sails, leap obliquely at enormous waves. The men,
knitted together aft into a ready group by the first sharp order of an
officer coming to take charge of the deck in bad weather:--"Keep handy
the watch," stood admiring her valiance. Their eyes blinked in the wind;
their dark faces were wet with drops of water more salt and bitter than
human tears; beards and moustaches, soaked, hung straight and dripping
like fine seaweed. They were fantastically misshapen; in high boots, in
hats like helmets, and swaying clumsily, stiff and bulky in glistening
oilskins, they resembled men strangely equipped for some fabulous
adventure. Whenever she rose easily to a towering green sea, elbows dug
ribs, faces brightened, lips murmured:--"Didn't she do it cleverly," and
all the heads turning like one watched with sardonic grins the foiled
wave go roaring to leeward, white with the foam of a monstrous rage.
But when she had not been quick enough and, struck heavily, lay over
trembling under the blow, we clutched at ropes, and looking up at the
narrow bands of drenched and strained sails waving desperately aloft, we
thought in our hearts:--"No wonder. Poor thing!"

The thirty-second day out of Bombay began inauspicio