We left the Hawaiian Islands late in March and, standing straight north, soon left the tropics behind, never to see them again on the voyage. As we plunged into the "roaring forties" we struck our first violent storm. The fury of the gale compelled us to heave to under staysails and drift, lying in the troughs of the seas and riding the waves sidewise. The storm was to me a revelation of what an ocean gale could be. Old sailors declared they never had seen anything worse. The wind shrieked and whistled in the rigging like a banshee. It was impossible to hear ordinary talk and the men had to yell into each other's ears. We put out oil bags along the weather side to keep the waves from breaking. But despite the oil that spread from them over the water, giant seas frequently broke over the brig. One crushed the waist boat into kindling wood and sent its fragments flying all over the deck. We were fortunate to have several other extra boats in the hold against just such an emergency. Waves sometimes filled the ship to the top of the bulwarks and the sailors waded about up to their breasts in brine until the roll of the vessel spilled the water overboard or it ran back into the sea through the scuppers and hawse-holes. The waves ran as high as the topsail yard. They would pile up to windward of us, gaining height and volume until we had to look up almost vertically to see the tops. Just as a giant comber seemed ready to break in roaring foam and curl over and engulf us, the staunch little brig would slip up the slope of water and ride over the summit in safety. Then the sea would shoot out on the other side of the vessel with a deafening hiss like that of a thousand serpents and rush skyward again, the wall of water streaked and shot with foam and looking like a polished mass of jade or agate. I had not imagined water could assume such wild and appalling shapes. Those monster waves seemed replete with malignant life, roaring out their hatred of us and watching alertly with their devilish foam-eyes for a chance to leap upon us and crush us or sweep us to death on their crests. I became genuinely seasick now for the first time. A little touch of seasickness I had experienced in the tropics was as nothing. To the rail I went time and again to give up everything within me, except my immortal soul, to the mad gods of sea. For two days I lay in my bunk. I tried pickles, fat bacon, everything that any sailor recommended, all to no purpose. I would have given all I possessed for one fleeting moment upon something level and still, something that did not plunge and lurch and roll from side to side and rise and fall. I think the most wretched part of seasickness is the knowledge that you cannot run away from it, that you are penned in with it, that go where you will, on the royal yard or in the bilge, you cannot escape the ghastly nightmare even for a minute.