"We couldn't be much more than a hundred miles or so to south'ard of St Helena; but we might be two thousand miles off the land, or we might be fifty. I had only been once in my life near the coast thereaway, and certainly my recollections of it weren't the most pleasant. As for the charts, so little was known of it that we couldn't depend upon them; yet there was no doubt the ship had been all night long in a strong set of water toward north-east, right across her course. For my own part, I was as anxious as anyone else to reach the Cape, and get rid of all this cursed nonsense; for since last night, I saw quite well by her look that Violet Hyde would never favour me, if I kept in her wake to the day of judgment. There was I, too, every time I came on deck and saw those round-house doors, my heart leapt into my throat, and I didn't know port from starboard! But what was the odds, that I'd have kissed the very pitch she walked upon, when _she_ wasn't for _me_!--being deep in love don't sharpen the faculties neither, and the more I thought of matters the stupider I seemed to get. 'Green Hand!' thought I, 'as Jacobs and the larboard watch call me, it appears--why, they're right enough! A green hand I came afloat nine years ago, and, by Jove! though I know the sea and what belongs to it, from sheer liking to them, as 'twere--it seems a green hand I'm to stick--seeing I know so blessed little of womankind, not to speak of that whole confounded world ashore! With all one's schemes and one's weather-eye, something new always keeps turning up to show one what an ass he is; and hang me, if I don't begin to suppose I'm only fit for working small traverses upon slavers and jack-nasty-faces, after all! There's Westwood, without troubling himself, seems to weather upon me, with her, like a Baltimore clipper on a Dutch schuyt!' In short, I wanted to leave the _Seringapatam_ as soon as I could, wish them all a good voyage together away for Bombay, sit down under Table Mountain, and then perhaps go and travel amongst the Hottentots by way of a change.