Life in deep-water ships is a school of evolution in which the law of the survival of the fittest has full play. Weaklings, mental or physical, die on the first voyage, or quit at the end of it. Soft men become hard men; hard men become iron men; iron men lose their human attributes. As the stronger virtues of nerve, pluck, and stamina increase, so do the softer qualities of mercy and kindness decline. Both young men were starved and ill-treated before the mast, until, accepting it as the law of the calling, they fought against it to the after end of the ship, then to enforce it against the weaker spirits they had distanced. Each in time became a competent second mate with a growing sense of his importance; then a first mate, with a fixed and accepted reputation for "buckoism" that reached across the thousand miles of sea to the other. Smith, drinking in a saloon at Callao, heard of Black Jones's feat in quelling the _Eldorado_ mutiny with a belaying pin and cursed him mentally in furious envy. Jones, blackguarding a man he had just ironed in the 'tween deck at sea, heard from the victim of a man who could take him down--Bully Smith, who sailed out of New York. Smith drank deeper from the news of Jones, and went to sea further committed to the blind worship of force. Jones insanely struck the man in irons, and in a week had ironed three others whom he had goaded into mutinous resentment of his abuse. Two strong, positive souls at the opposite ends of the earth, united by the first and lowest of primordial emotions--hatred and fear--were reinforcing each other to their mutual undoing. Had the kindergarten teacher done her duty and brought them together in childhood, or had they fought it out as boys, this might have been averted. Yet there came another chance in middle life. The fate which gripped them sent one east from San Francisco, and the other west from New York, and the two ships sighted each other at the crossing point of voyages. Here a vicious, biting cold south-westerly gale blew the vessels against the rocky shores of Cape Horn, and in the furious turmoil of surf, backed by mountainous antarctic seas that picked both ships to pieces, but two men reached the shore alive--two strong, hardy, and enduring mates, Smith and Jones. Bruised and bleeding, drenched, freezing, and exhausted they painfully climbed the rocks five miles apart, and struck inland over a hummocky plateau, walking fast to keep out the cold while the moisture in their clothing stiffened to ice, not knowing where they were going, but dimly hoping for aid from the savages.