In one week the _Washington Irving_ made 1467 miles, but to Emerson, as to most passengers in those days, this form of travel was anything but pleasant. “I find the sea-life an acquired taste,” he sums up rather sadly, “like that for tomatoes and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise and odour are not to be dispensed with. The floor of your room is sloped at an angle of twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked every morning with the belief that someone was tipping up my berth. Nobody likes being treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis and stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea remains longer.... Such discomfort and such danger as the narratives of the captain and mate disclose are bad enough as the costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe; but the wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.” Emerson found the worst inconvenience was the lack of light in the cabin, but the fifteen days from the time they left soundings were to him long, joyless and severe. The American poet James Russell Lowell has left us a character sketch of a chief mate whom he describes as “not an American, but I should never have guessed it by his speech, which was the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a good taster of dialects.... He used to walk the deck with his hands in his pockets, in seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his eye.... He is as impervious to cold as the polar bear. On the Atlantic, if the wind blew a gale from the north-east, and it was cold as an English summer, he was sure to turn out in a calico shirt and trousers, his furzy brown chest half bare, and slippers without stockings. But ... he comes out in a monstrous pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean when the evening is so hot that Adam would have been glad to leave off his fig-leaves.... He ... always combs his hair, and works himself into a black frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waistcoat) before he comes to meals, sacrificing himself nobly and painfully to the social proprieties. The second mate, on the other hand, who eats after us, enjoys the privilege of shirt-sleeves, and is, I think, the happier man of the two.”