Even in fine weather the loathsome old tub leaked like a sieve: she had about half a foot of freeboard, and the water came through her gaping top-sides and uncaulked deck, so that the cabin and my berth were alike a chronic swamp. The junk we ate was green with decay and mould; the ship-biscuits were peripatetic because of the weevils that inhabited them; the butter was rancid with a rancidness indescribable; and the pea-soup was swarthy with the filth of vermin. With a fair wind--and as far as the Traverse we carried a fair wind--the rotten old hooker--rotten from truck to keel, for her sole suit of canvas was as rotten as the ragged remains of her copper-sheathing--had a maximum speed of five knots per hour. As she rolled lumberingly through the short seas of the Upper Gulf, the green water topped her low bulwarks, and, swashing down on to the deck, lifted heavily the great undressed pine-trunks which, lashed to stanchions, formed her deck load. As those rose they strained the deck till they all but tore it from the beams, and as they dropped when the water receded they fell with a crash that all but stove in deck and beams together. With all her defects and abominations, there was one redeeming feature in the _Emma Morrison_. Her mate--she had but one--was a stanch, frank, stalwart seaman; the boatswain was a tough old man-o’-war’s man; and the crew--scant in numbers, for she was atrociously undermanned--were as fine a set of fellows as ever set foot in ratline. How they obeyed the ill-conditioned skipper; how they endured the foul discomfort of the fo’k’sle and the wretched rations; how, hour after hour and day after day, they dragged loyally at the Sisyphean toil of the pumps; how they bore freezing cold, exposure, sleeplessness, and general misery I shall never forget. Off Anticosta we had our first gale. It was a good honest blow, that a staunch craft would have welcomed; but the rotten old _Emma Morrison_ could not look it in the face. It left her sails in ribbons, her top-hamper anyhow, her hold full of water, in which her ill-stowed cargo of timber swashed about with gruesome thuds on her ribs and knees. When the gale blew itself out we were out somewhere on the western edge of the banks of Newfoundland, and dead helpless. All hands went to the pumps save the captain, the mate, and a couple of old seamen, who betook themselves assiduously to sail-mending. My work was at the wheel. With the foresail on her, the only whole sail extant, she had just steerage way; and I stood, twelve hours a day, day after day, at the old jade’s wheel. It was bitter work, for by this time it was the middle of December, and the spray froze where it lighted.