Three Men in a Boat VI: Anecdotes

He paid for the whole series but could not eat anything but some biscuits …

Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy, either—seemed discontented like.

At six, they came and told him dinner was ready.  The announcement aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that there was some of that two-pound-five to be worked off, and he held on to ropes and things and went down.  A pleasant odour of onions and hot ham, mingled with fried fish and greens, greeted him at the bottom of the ladder; and then the steward came up with an oily smile, and said:

“What can I get you, sir?”

“Get me out of this,” was the feeble reply.

And they ran him up quick, and propped him up, over to leeward, and left him.

For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on thin captain’s biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were thin, not the captain) and soda-water; but, towards Saturday, he got uppish, and went in for weak tea and dry toast, and on Monday he was gorging himself on chicken broth.  He left the ship on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from the landing-stage he gazed after it regretfully.

“There she goes,” he said, “there she goes, with two pounds’ worth of food on board that belongs to me, and that I haven’t had.”

He said that if they had given him another day he thought he could have put it straight.

So I set my face against the sea trip.  Not, as I explained, upon my own account.  I was never queer.  But I was afraid for George.  George said he should be all right, and would rather like it, but he would advise Harris and me not to think of it, as he felt sure we should both be ill.  Harris said that, to himself, it was always a mystery how people managed to get sick at sea—said he thought people must do it on purpose, from affectation—said he had often wished to be, but had never been able.

Then he told us anecdotes of how he had gone across the Channel when it was so rough that the passengers had to be tied into their berths, and he and the captain were the only two living souls on board who were not ill.  Sometimes it was he and the second mate who were not ill; but it was generally he and one other man.  If not he and another man, then it was he by himself.

It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick—on land.  At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick.  Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.

If most men were like a fellow I saw on the Yarmouth boat one day, I could account for the seeming enigma easily enough.  It was just off Southend Pier, I recollect, and he was leaning out through one of the port-holes in a very dangerous position.  I went up to him to try and save him.

“Hi! come further in,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder.  “You’ll be overboard.”

“Oh my! I wish I was,” was the only answer I could get; and there I had to leave him.

Three weeks afterwards, I met him in the coffee-room of a Bath hotel, talking about his voyages, and explaining, with enthusiasm, how he loved the sea.

“Good sailor!” he replied in answer to a mild young man’s envious query; “well, I did feel a little queer once, I confess.  It was off Cape Horn.  The vessel was wrecked the next morning.”

I said:

“Weren’t you a little shaky by Southend Pier one day, and wanted to be thrown overboard?”

“Southend Pier!” he replied, with a puzzled expression.

“Yes; going down to Yarmouth, last Friday three weeks.”

“Oh, ah—yes,” he answered, brightening up; “I remember now.  I did have a headache that afternoon.  It was the pickles, you know.  They were the most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable boat.  Did you have any?”

Vocabulario:

Propped: lo apoyaron

Leeward: a sotavento

Uppish: audaz

Gorging: comiendo hasta el hartazgo

Queer: raro

Swarm: que se abarrotaban

Inglés, computación e Internet. Spanish for tourists. Teléfonos 0387-4249159/155723965. 4400 Salta. Argentina.