The convict ship _Childe Harold_ drove steadily down the North Atlantic with the trade-wind, and then, losing those prosperous gales something north of the Equator, crept stealthily through a wide, white, gleaming zone of calms, blurred with fainting catspaws as a mirror is dimmed by the breath. No incident of any sort broke the profound monotony of the routine of shipboard life. Captain Barrett and the subaltern killed the time by firing at a mark with pistols, by cards, chess, deck quoits, fishing for sharks, and the like. Their duties were trifling. The sergeant of the guard seemed to do all the work. The discipline of the sea had the regularity of the tick of a clock. Sights were punctually taken, the log hove, the watch relieved--so it went on. The crew came and went to the sound of Balls’s pipe or to the warning voice of the officer of the watch. I was now looking very close into the sea life, and was of opinion that it was a sickening, tedious calling. The atmosphere of romance which had coloured my early thoughts of it, got from my father’s and his friends’ merry or wild or exciting yarns, had perished out of my mind long before we were up with the Equator, as the term is. The captain was burdened with enormous responsibilities. The safety of a large, valuable ship freighted with human lives was dependent upon him, and his pay was perhaps less than the wages of a head-waiter of a City tavern. The mates were at the mercy of the captain, who could break them if he chose, send them forward to do common sailor’s work and ruin them. They lived without friendship. One was superior to the other. The captain addressed them only on matters of ship work, and talked familiarly with nobody but the doctor and military officers. There were three mates. Two of them led lives as lonely as the ship’s figure-head; the third, who was a person of no consequence, would carry his pipe into the boatswain’s or apprentices’ berth, and so kill time for himself. I had not guessed that this was the life of the deep when I used to listen to the ocean talk of my father’s friends at Stepney or view the ships in the Thames, and create a fairy sea with rich skies and spicy breezes for them to sail over. It was my acquaintance, however, with the forecastle side of the life that completely ruined my idealism. I could not wonder that sailors should be the mutinous and growling dogs they are represented when I peeped into the forecastle and smelt the smells and blinked at the gloom and beheld the damp and the dirt, the half-clad figures of men who had shipped without a shift of clothes and whose wage would not bring them within hail of the slop-chest; when I saw the lumps of green pork or blue and iron beef carried from the galley into the forecastle along with the slush-thick peasoup or the dingy, bolster-hard duff at which any famished mongrel of the London streets might hiccough. ‘Is it the same everywhere at sea?’ I once asked Will.