Had the middle watch. Heavy seas were running and the wind was strong with violent squalls of rain and snow. It was a dirty night. The _Quest_ rolled worse than anything I have ever known, with staggering jerks that made it impossible to let go a support. At times the ship sagged down so heavily to leeward that my heart was in my mouth, for it seemed as if she could never recover herself. Peering to windward as the great seas bore down upon us I was reminded of Kipling’s Be well assured that on our side The abiding oceans fight, Though headlong wind and heaping tide Make us their sport to-night. which is comforting to know. He always seems to catch just the right expression, as: Out of the mist into the mirk The glimmering combers roll. Almost these mindless waters work As though they had a soul— However, as the Boss used to say: “When things are bad any change is likely to be for the better.” We pour some vile epithets upon the head of poor old _Quest_, but she really does not deserve them, for she is always at her best when things are bad. Commander Wild says she is like a woman, quoting something about “Women in our hours of ease, perfidious, fickle, hard to please!” I suppose he knows all about it. Anyway, she has brought us through what might well have caused many a more stately ship to founder. Things have remained much the same during the day—water keeps coming over the gunwales in huge masses and hundreds of tons pass hourly across “The Rubicon,” as we call the wash of water in the waist of her. Occasionally big green seas come aboard _en masse_, flooding the whole ship, and find their way everywhere, through cracks in the doors, spirting through the keyholes and through the ventilators, which, with all the ports tightly closed, must be kept open. Macklin places in my mouth an incorrect rendering which I would never apply to the gentler sex, but which is certainly very appropriate to the _Quest_. “Bridget,” the pig which was presented to us by Mr. Jacobsen on leaving South Georgia, had a very miserable time, and I was almost giving instructions to have it killed right away. It was totally unable to keep its footing on the slippery deck and it was very sea-sick. I handed it over to the care of McLeod, who found it a snug berth in the _bathroom_, where it quickly recovered its spirits and began to develop an insatiable appetite.