My place at table was at top, on the captain's right: a seat of distinction, but a matter of accident so far as I was concerned. The commander of this steamer, to give the worthy skipper a sounding name, was a kindly hearted seaman named Strutt, who had used the sea for many years in sailing ships, and had much to tell about the ocean life. One of the passengers was a retired shipmaster who, I understood, was making the voyage to the Cape to seek some waterside berth in South Africa; he was a Newcastle man and had been bred to the sea in the coal trade; such was his contempt of steam he could find nothing in his rude and quaint dialect vigorous enough to dress it in. He sat within three or four of the captain on the left and they often argued, and their speech was my diversion. I remember one day, shortly before we made the island of Madeira, that these two men got upon the subject of Polar expeditions. The captain said that the discovery of the North Pole would be as important to navigation and science as the discovery of America was to civilisation. The other replied that the North Pole was of no use to any mortal man. What was it? An imagination. Nothing you could see, or sit upon, or lean against. At this a great many people laughed. A middle-aged lady sitting at a little distance on my right begged that the North Pole would not be mentioned; she had lost a promising nephew in consequence of it. He had sailed in one of the expeditions and had fallen into a deep hole beside the ship when she lay upon the ice, and, marvellous to relate, though the body of the poor young man was not discovered until six weeks afterwards, it was so perfectly fresh, the face so lifelike, the colour on the cheeks so exactly as in health, that all wondered he did not speak and smile. 'There's no perishing in ice,' said the retired shipmaster in a deep voice, 'once dead, ye keep arle on. Sir John Franklin was to be found. Nought was wanting but the right sort of men to look for him. He's somewhere up there still, just as he died, poor chap, hard as a statue, him and the rest of them, saving those they fed on.' 'What's the action of salt water on a body?' said an old gentleman sitting five or six down on the opposite side. 'It drowns,' replied the retired shipmaster. 'I don't mean that,' said the other, 'does it preserve as ice does?' 'No, sir,' answered the shipmaster. 'The sea sarves a drowned sailor as the crimps sarve the live ones. It strips him, and when he's naked it tarns to and kicks and beats him till his mother wouldn't know whose child it was.' 'Not always,' exclaimed the old gentleman with emphasis. The retired shipmaster leaned forward to see him, but made no reply.