But while in St. Bartholomew’s Bay I was left alone on the vessel all day with no companions save the gulls in the air and the sharks in the water. Both were plentiful. The gulls made themselves especially sociable. They would come boldly on board and feast on the quarters of turtle-meat hung up in the rigging. Once I found one in the cabin pecking away at the crumbs on the table. His gullible mind got into a terrible state on seeing me. I whacked him to my heart’s content with the table-cloth. He experienced great trouble in flying up the cabin stairway. In fact, he couldn’t steer himself straight up stairs. His aim on starting himself was correct enough, like that of many a young man or woman in commencing life; but instead of going the straight and narrow path up the companionway he would bring up against a deck beam. There is no limit to the feeding capacity of those Pacific-coast gulls. The wonder is where it all goes to. I have experimentally cut up and thrown in small pieces to a gull as much fat pork as would make a meal for two men, and the gull has promptly swallowed it all, waited for more, and visibly got no bigger. They never get fat. Sometimes I tied two bits of meat to either end of a long string and flung it overboard. Barely had it touched the water when the meat at either end was swallowed by two of these bottomless scavengers, and they would fly away, each pulling hard at the latest received contents of the other’s stomach. The picture reminded me of some married lives. They pulled together, but they didn’t pull the right way.