Now this was to be one of the most memorable voyages of my life--and I have traveled a good deal. To begin with, we had the worst accommodations I have ever endured on any vessel. Our ship was only a cargo boat and there were no passenger-cabins whatever. We slept in a sort of steerage in the hold, in company with twelve of the crew. It was the most filthy hole I was ever in and reeked with vermin, including rats of the largest and most ferocious kind. The crew were the usual scum found on such boats and were the dirtiest human beings I have ever seen. They disapproved of us--and we of them--to such a degree that I often expected they would try to do us harm. Sugden, however, took all this as part of the game, and his sporting spirit made it possible for us to exist. His experiences in the Far North had made him familiar with all sorts of white men, but I had never seen such as these. People now and then speak slightingly of the kaffir, but the Swazi, with his daily ablutions, is a very superior person when compared with these so-called "white men." When our ship reached the warmer latitudes our hole became unbearable and we moved our pallets to the poop-deck, where we managed to get some sleep in spite of the terrific rainstorms we ran into. We felt that it was better to be drowned by clean rainwater than to suffocate and die slowly in our steerage bunks. However, our miserable existence used to get on our nerves now and then and we would drown our sorrows with whatever liquor we could obtain. There was one other passenger on the boat. He was a typical American of the western type who had lived in South Africa for years. Every year he made a trip to the United States and brought back blooded stock of various kinds. He was the slap-dash, breezy kind of big-hearted soul and soon became chummy with us. Owing to the fact that he was a regular tripper on this boat, he was able to share accommodations with one of the officers. It soon became his custom to visit us. He would sing out, "Look out below!" and then would creep down the shaky ladder which was the only means of entry to our place of misery. Always he brought a bottle, and the excellent "hootch," as he called it, did much to make our lives bearable. He was a good story-teller and would always introduce a preposterous yarn with the preface, "Now this _is_ true!" We gave him quite a run for his money when it came to yarning, as both of us had been about a bit, Sugden in the north and I in the south of the world. The first break in the monotony of this dreadful voyage came when we reached St. Lucia, in the British West Indies. This is a gorgeous bit of the tropics set in an opal sea, with cloud-covered mountain-tops that seem to rake the sky.