But if the seasickness of our men of science excited only our mirth, no such merry reaction greeted our discovery that Ah Sam, our Chinese cook, was also similarly indisposed. At first that Ah Sam was seasick was solely a deduction on our part to account for his complete disappearance from the galley, and the fact that for meal after meal we had to make out in the messroom with only such cold scraps as Charley Tong Sing, the steward, dished out. But when two days went by thus, Ah Sam’s whereabouts became a matter of concern to all of us and especially to the doctor. Still where he had stowed himself, even the bosun could not discover, and to all our inquiries about Ah Sam and to all our complaints about the food, we got from Charley only a shake of the head and in a high singsong the unvaried reply,
“Ah Sam, he velly sick man now. Cholly Tong Sing, he no feel so good too.”
With this unsatisfactory state of affairs in our supply department we had perforce to remain content, until after three days of total eclipse, Ah Sam rose again, one might say, almost from the dead.
I had just come up from the humid engine room to the main deck, and still bathed in perspiration, had paused to get my lungs full of fresh salt air before diving aft into the shelter of the poop. For a moment, with the wind blowing through my whiskers, I clung to the main shrouds. With both feet braced wide apart on the heaving deck, I stood there cooling off, when from the open passage to the port chartroom, which was the as yet unused workroom for Newcomb’s taxidermy, I heard in the doctor’s unmistakable Virginian accent,
“Well, I’ll be damned! Lend a hand here, Melville!”
I poked my head through the door. Ambler, who I afterwards learned had been tracking down the source of some mysterious groans, had pulled open a locker beneath the chart table, and there, neatly fitted into that confined space, was the lost Ah Sam!
I gasped. Have you ever seen a seasick Chinaman? The combination of Ah Sam’s natural yellow complexion with the sickly green pallor induced beneath his skin by mal de mer, gave him a ghastly appearance the like of which no ordinary corpse could duplicate. To this weird effect his shrunken body contributed greatly, for he had certainly disgorged everything he had ever assimilated since emigrating from China. (The evidence for this apparently exaggerated statement was such as to convince the most incredulous, but I will not go into details.)
Surgeon Ambler, holding his nose with one hand, grabbed Ah Sam by the pigtail and unceremoniously jerked him forth. Immediately Ah Sam sagged to the deck, his eyes rolling piteously.
Also holding my nose, I seized our cook by one shoulder and dragged him out on deck, where the surgeon gave him a dose of chloroform, which composed him somewhat. Why he had not already died, shut up in that locker, I cannot comprehend except on the assumption that he grew up in one of those stinkpot factories which Chipp, who was an authority on that country, claimed Chinese pirates maintain. But fearful lest he die yet unless kept out in the air, the captain planked him down at the lee wheel, where under the constant eye of the helmsman, he could not again crawl off to hide in some glory hole. There, clutching with a death grip at the spokes as the wheel spun beneath his fingers, Ah Sam stayed till next day, a fearful sight with pigtail flying in the breeze and eyes almost popping from their sockets each time a green sea came aboard; and whenever she took a heavy roll, poor Ah Sam’s lower jaw sagged open and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Such a picture of abject despair and utter anguish as that Chinaman, I never saw.
The fourth day out the weather cleared, moderated somewhat, and the wind shifted to the northeast, so that assisted again by our sails, running on the starboard tack and keeping our desired course, we made a little over five knots for a day’s run of one hundred and thirty miles.