APRIL 17.
Piansi i riposi di quest’ umil vita,
E sospirai la mia perduta pace!”
I regret the loss of our dead calm and our crawling pace of a knot and a half an hour; for during the last four days we have had nothing but gales and squalls, mountainous waves, the vessel rolling and pitching incessantly, and the sea perpetually pouring in at the windows and down through the hatchway. Into the bargain, we are now sufficiently towards the north to find the weather perishingly cold, and we have neither wood nor coals enough on board to allow a fire for the cabin.
But, among all our inconveniences, that which is the most intolerable undoubtedly arises from the sick apothecary. It seems that his complaint is the consequence of dram-drinking, which has affected his liver. Since his coming on board, he has continued to indulge his taste; and growing worse (as might be expected), he has now thought proper to put himself in a state of salivation: the consequence is, that what with the mercury and what with the man, aided by the concomitant effluvia of our cargo of sugar, rum, and coffee, for a combination of villanous smells, Falstaff’s buck-basket was nothing to the cabin of the Sir Godfrey Webster. I could almost fancy myself Slawken-bergius’s Don Diego just returned from the Promontory of Noses, and that I had exchanged my snub for a proboscis; so much do all my other senses appear to be absorbed in that of smelling, and so completely do I seem to myself to be nose all over. As to the poor apothecary, his mercury annoys us without any signs as yet of its benefiting himself. He grows worse daily, and I greatly doubt his ever reaching England.