That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itself—it has made a fairly voluminous official report—but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that. Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and delay, sea—sickness, general discomfort and humiliating self—revelation are the master values of these memories. I was sick all through the journey out. I don’t know why. It was the only time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some pretty bad weather since I became a boat-builder. But that phantom smell of potatoes was peculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every one of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by quap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but the stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the _Maud Mary_ under way at once, to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I lacked that coat! And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worst bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conducting his illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera house than a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond as himself, and divided his time almost equally between smoking it and trying to clean it. “There’s only three things you can clean a pipe with,” he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand. “The best’s a feather, the second’s a straw, and the third’s a girl’s hairpin. I never see such a ship. You can’t find any of ’em. Last time I came this way I did find hairpins anyway, and found ’em on the floor of the captain’s cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?... Feelin’ better?” At which I usually swore. “Oh, you’ll be all right soon. Don’t mind my puffin’ a bit? Eh?” He never tired of asking me to “have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes you forget it, and that’s half the battle.” He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue eye at the captain by the hour together. “Captain’s a Card,” he would say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. “He’d like to know what we’re up to. He’d like to know—no end.”