To awake in the morning, and find a large and healthy-looking tarantula squatting on your pillow within ten inches of your nose, with his basilisk eyes fixed on yours, and apparently saying, “You’re only just awake, are you? I’ve been sitting here all the morning watching you.”
You know if you move he’ll bite you, somewhere; and if he does bite you, you’ll go mad and dance ad libitum; so you twist your mouth in the opposite direction and ejaculate—
“Steward!” but the steward does not come—in fact he is forward, seeing after the breakfast. Meanwhile the gentleman on the pillow is moving his horizontal mandibles in a most threatening manner, and just as he makes a rush for your nose you tumble out of bed with a shriek; and, if a very nervous person, probably run on deck in your shirt.
Or, to fall asleep under the following circumstances: The bulkheads, all around, black with cock-and-hen-roaches, a few of which are engaged cropping your toe-nails, or running off with little bits of the skin of your calves; bugs in the crevices of your cot, a flea tickling the sole of your foot, a troop of ants carrying a dead cockroach over your pillow, lively mosquitoes attacking you everywhere, hammer-legged flies occasionally settling on your nose, rats running in and rats running out, your lamp just going out, and the delicious certainty that an indefinite number of earwigs and scorpions, besides two centipedes and a tarantula, are hiding themselves somewhere in your cabin.
Note 1. Officers, as well as men, are allowed one half-gill of rum daily, with this difference,—the former pay for theirs, while the latter do not.