We sped over the water then at quite a respectable gait, and, in trying to make a little westing, if the skipper is driving the ship for all she’s worth, for both wind and sea are heavy, no man can blame him. The men continue to grow worse and worse, and there are not six in the forecastle who do not show the effects of exposure, chilblains and sea-boils. The latter have increased shockingly; three more men are down with them, Coleman, Pettersen, and Eckers. Coleman this morning showed me two dreadful-looking wrists; the left one was particularly bad, with a deep rent or cavity in the flesh itself that a silver dollar would not cover; not bleeding, but mortifying and sloughing terribly, presenting a sickening spectacle. Coleman says that some of the others are a good deal worse than he is. Hapless creatures! how they manage to do any work at all with these wounds is difficult to understand. Let them be bandaged ever so tightly and what will it avail in the rough work? The bandages soon work loose, and there is the bare, raw flesh exposed to the salt-water and the rubbing of their sleeves. If Job had sea-boils, it would be safe betting that they were the worst afflictions that he had. Why will not sailors take care of themselves ashore and obviate to a certain extent such suffering as they undergo off Cape Horn? The youngest and healthiest of our men, those with clear skins, do not seem to suffer much with these boils; and they say that another safeguard to a certain degree against them is to dry the wrists as much as possible before turning in. Bad food, though, with a preponderance of salt meat, will soon play havoc with the blood of the stoutest man; and while there seems to be a fairly good variety of food on the “Higgins” for the crew, yet the majority of sailors on Yankee ships are fed chiefly on wretched, scurvy-breeding food. The name that American ships used to bear thirty and forty years ago for the superlatively good rations that the men got, is by no means deserved at the present day by the majority of our own deep-water ships. Many are the tales of starvation told by men arriving on Yankee ships at San Francisco in these days; I mention San Francisco particularly, as that port has until very lately sustained the reputation of withholding justice from sailors to a remarkable extent. As to the stories of foremast hands lying on the witness-stands in court when defending themselves, I am convinced it is generally not so. We have seen several acts committed by the mates aboard this vessel against the sailors which would be regarded as entirely untrue by a justice if told by a seaman. In the great majority of cases the word of a bucko mate is taken in court in preference to the sailor’s, and in this way there is an inconceivable amount of injustice done to the latter. For instance, there are here at least a dozen men in the forecastle the word of any one of whom I would unhesitatingly believe rather than that of either of the mates.