they are beating the game.

On the sea-stretches I was fairly abstemious; but ashore I drank more. I
seemed to need more, anyway, in the tropics. This is a common
experience, for the excessive consumption of alcohol in the tropics by
white men is a notorious fact. The tropics is no place for white-skinned
men. Their skin-pigment does not protect them against the excessive
white light of the sun. The ultra-violet rays, and other high-velocity
and invisible rays from the upper end of the spectrum, rip and tear
through their tissues, just as the X-ray ripped and tore through the
tissues of so many experimenters before they learned the danger.

White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. They become
savage, merciless. They commit monstrous acts of cruelty that they would
never dream of committing in their original temperate climate. They
become nervous, irritable, and less moral. And they drink as they never
drank before. Drinking is one form of the many forms of degeneration
that set in when white men are exposed too long to too much white light.
The increase of alcoholic consumption is automatic. The tropics is no
place for a long sojourn. They seem doomed to die anyway, and the heavy
drinking expedites the process. They don't reason about it. They just
do it.

The sun sickness got me, despite the fact that I had been in the tropics
only a couple of years. I drank heavily during this time, but right here
I wish to forestall misunderstanding. The drinking was not the cause of
the sickness, nor of the abandonment of the voyage. I was strong as a
bull, and for many months I fought the sun sickness that was ripping and
tearing my surface and nervous tissues to pieces. All through the New
Hebrides and the Solomons and up among the atolls on the Line, during
this period under a tropic sun, rotten with malaria, and suffering from a
few minor afflictions such as Biblical leprosy with the silvery skin, I
did the work of five men.

To navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and
unlighted coasts of the coral seas is a man's work in itself. I was the
only navigator on board. There was no one to check me up on the working
out of my observations, nor with whom I could advise in the ticklish
darkness among uncharted reefs and shoals. And I stood all watches.
There was no sea-man on board whom I could trust to stand a mate's watch.
I was mate as well as captain. Twenty-four ho