"I was. It took that old box of misfortune thirty-two days to make Port Duluth. Every day we had some breakdown or other. She was like a good many other ships that fly the Red Ensign, worn out. But did I grumble? Not a bit of it. I looked at it as any man will who's got sand in him. It was a fight. There was no fighting in Victoria Street; it was simply riding through life on rubber tyres. Books, art, comfort, philosophy, all these things are well enough; but the _Corydon_, the rusty, leaking, treacherous old _Corydon_, with her starting rivets and banging old engines, she was the real thing, the thing to mark a man and teach him what he's made of. "I don't suppose any of you people have ever heard of Port Duluth. I certainly hadn't. When I asked where it was, the others told me it was 'up a creek.' In England this would have meant very little; but I had learned from my mother to call even the Thames a creek, and so I was able to swallow the apparent paradox of a seven-thousand-ton ship insinuating herself up to what was known locally as 'a railhead.' When I persisted and wanted to know the name of the creek, nobody knew, but they said it was one of the channels of the Niger River. Then, I argued in my bookish way, Port Duluth must be in Nigeria. But this wasn't so certain at all. I became acquainted with the ragged edge of the British Empire. I gathered that the boundaries were not entirely settled, but that when the railway was carried along some watershed into the interior, it would link up with another system and our sphere of influence would automatically extend to include Port Duluth. And when I kept on at my shipmates and wanted to know what made the sphere of influence so very precious I received the staggering answer that it was nuts. We were building battle-ships and recruiting armies and building railways and bridges and harbours, for nuts. To me, walking to and fro on the after-deck in the glow of a tropical sunset, it seemed absurd. You see, I knew nothing of raw products. Until I went to sea I didn't know how far the common things come. I didn't know that Yorkshire pig-iron was smelted from Tunisian and Ionian ore, or that the sugar in my tea had gone from Java to New York and from there to Liverpool. I didn't know where things came from nor where they went. The geography at school had some of it no doubt. I can recall some few vague facts about flax at Belfast and jute at Dundee. Humph! That trip to Port Duluth was worth a million geography lessons.