Young officers at times are inclined to be a bit "easy" with men, thinking it will result in more willingness. The more seasoned members of the cloth, men who have sailed as merchant officers for many years, realize that the maintenance of discipline aboard ship is only possible under a rule of autocratic severity, demanding instant obedience to orders and quick punishment for the first departure from the iron bonds. This is as necessary as life itself. The least hesitation, the slightest possibility of argument, when ordering men to places of danger or extreme difficulty, would soon result in disaster. At sea we have the sharp distinction of caste--the wonderful potency of _Mister_ So and So. He is an officer, if not always a gentleman. To forget the "_sir_" when addressing one of our mates would have been a dangerous thing to do. In fact only one man ever did it, but he was a Kanaka and signs on later in the story. In many ships, captain and mates never fail to use their "handles" in addressing each other, and this was so on the _Fuller_, in fact there was as little familiarity aft, in the personal relations of our officers, as one might expect to find between the representatives of two armies meeting to arrange a truce. And the wonderful part of it was that they left the ship at the end of the voyage as coldly distant as the day they stepped aboard; that is all but the second mate, which is again running me ahead of the lawful progress of this yarn. However, to get back to the deck and to the lives of our particular little sea community, plowing their painful way over the cruel surface of the many wrinkled ocean, we resented the underhanded flavor of the affair between the mates and Tony. With all the excuses for hazing granted and allowed for, there is nothing to be said in favor of lying about a fight. The imputation of the knife, held as evidence by the mate, and the whole character of the mixup left a bad taste in our mouths for many weeks. From that time on we entered upon a stage of the voyage notable for its hardship. The officers were drivers from the time we dropped the Navesink Highlands, but for a long time after the incident off the River Plate, nothing but harsh words found any place in their vocabulary. Weather conditions became more unsettled and severe and one blow followed close on the heels of another. We were in oilskins for weeks at a time, soaked to the skin through the worn out "slickers." Most of us developed salt water boils and one formed on my left wrist, through the constant chafing, and has left a scar to this day, as I had the habit of stopping the sleeves of my coat with a few turns of marline to keep the water out. It was impossible to dry things in the brief four hours below, and the "slop chest" was soon depleted of its stock of new oil clothing. It would be hard to picture a more depressing period than that through which we passed just before entering the real weather off Cape Horn.