Staggering up, he clambered into the lower bunk, and spent an awful hour of misery with a babel of sounds racking his brain, and every possible motion threatening dislocation to his body. The small bunk was too large for him. He could not brace himself tight; but, like a pea in a drum, was rattled from side to side and top to bottom, his head at one time threatening to fly off as the bows dipped; his body sinking with the most sickening desire to part with his head as the stern went under, and his arms, legs, and head flopping about hopelessly to each dizzy roll.
Then between, and coming through every motion, was the jarring of the screw as the stern was lifted up—a most soul-disturbing sensation, enough in itself to unsettle the innermost lashings, the smallest nerves and sinews of the body.
“What the devil possesses the ship?” thought Frank, in a state of feeble protest against this indignity of sea-sickness that held him in its clammy grasp. “Hulloa!” he groaned, as he heard someone staggering along the alley-way.
The door was opened, and the new-comer dived in to the roll of the ship as though he were violently impelled from the rear, ending up by stumbling over the gun-case.
“That’s the fifty-seventh time I’ve been knocked off my pins within an hour by this infernal buck-jumper. What have you been doing, messmate; taking a shower-bath?” And Mr Webster, the speaker, with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, sat down on the edge of the bunk and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.
Frank turned his head with a look of disgust, but the ship, pitching and rolling at the same moment, sent him and his bedclothes in a heap to one end of the bunk.
“God forgive me,” said the officer, making futile attempts to keep his feet out of the water; “but you’re a most dismal object.”
“What’s the matter with the ship?” growled Frank.
Webster opened his mouth to laugh, but a vicious lurch banged his head against the iron side of the cabin.
“Ship, do you call it?” he cried. “Why, ’tis nothing but a steel tube with an engine in it, and there’s not a ship afloat that would not ride over this sea without a heave.”