CHAPTER V
[NEPTUNE COMES ON BOARD]
We were then in about five degrees of North Latitude, the trades had failed us, and the doldrums claimed their share of bracing and hauling, giving us little time for any other work. Every ripple on the brazen sea called for a different angle of the yards, and in dead calm we lay with our head yards braced sharp up and the after yards square, the courses guyed out from the masts by slap lines and bowlines. During the day a vertical sun beat down on our bare deck in unmerciful fashion, lifting the scorching pitch from the seams and all but addling our senses with the heat. The mates became more and more exacting, every job palled, and the stuffy, unpalatable food of the fo'c'sle stuck in our throats. The vessel was a chip of hell floating on the unforgiving ocean; riveted for days, that stretched to weeks, amid the patches of rusty sea weed, a thousand feet across, that tangled about the rudder post, great sun-scorched fragments of the dead Sargasso Sea.
And all of this time we knew that the Southern branch of the Equatorial Current was sending us back to the W. N. W. at the rate of several miles a day!
In watch below, choking with the heat, we lay tossing sleeplessly in our bunks while the sickly smell of the bilges came up from the fore peak through the wind sails let down to ventilate the hold. Cockroaches throve in added millions, and we were treated to our first rations of weevily tack. The little white worms seemed to be everywhere. The cracker hash was riddled with them as Chow selected the rottenest bread for this purpose. Most of us developed boils, and the dark brown taste, left by the vile food, resulted in a general loss of appetite. The heat even forced the rats from the hold and on a dark night we could hear them scampering about under the fo'c'sle head. The healthy sea tan of the temperate zone left our faces, and we became peevish and morose.
Some of us tried to forget our misery by reading the books sent aboard by the Seamen's Friend Society, others whiled away the hot watches below, when sleep was impossible, by making wonderful models of ships in bottles, almost a lost art nowadays, and revived on board the Fuller by Frenchy. Most of these works of art found resting places behind the bars of waterfront saloons in Honolulu.
One blessing that came to us in this hell afloat was the fact that the mates winked at the snatching of a few hours' sleep during the night watches on deck, otherwise there is no telling how some of us would have survived.
Our fo'c'sle scuttle butt soured, and Old Smith of the starboard watch emptied it one Sunday morning and charred the inside with a bundle of rope yarns to which he set fire. He told us how water gets bad in the tropics, and then how its own impurities destroy themselves. "The bugs scoff each other and die," and, went on Smithy, "they drops to the bottom of the butt, like white skeletons, and the water is as clean and good as ever."