He put the neck of a vodka bottle in my mouth and let the liquid fire trickle down my throat. Next day I was too sick to stand on my feet. The captain ordered me out of my bunk and to work. I tried but couldn't get up. Then he beat me, saying I was a drunken loafer.
Later I learned that when I had fallen overboard the quartermaster immediately called for volunteers to man the lifeboat. The captain, who had never dreamed of sending help to me, shouted to him, shaking a harpoon:
"If you lower the boat, you will get this harpoon in your belly."
As a matter of fact, they were not obliged to send a boat for me. A captain need not attempt the rescue of a man overboard if it is liable to endanger the lives of others of his crew.
The quartermaster, however, calmly walked away, got his volunteers, lowered the boat, went after me, and left the captain in a towering rage.
The shock of that experience brought on a sort of nervous spasm which made my hands shake. I was like that for four years, and even to-day I sometimes have nightmares and dream of falling from a mast, of the albatross, of the captain and the vodka.
I lay in my bunk and thought it over. I had been Count Felix von Luckner, of a titled, landowning family, descendant of a long line of military officers and of an illustrious Marshal of France. Now I was a mere cleaner of the pig sties and the latrines, fed like a pig on scraps left by others, cursed and beaten and considered by the captain to be carrion not worth saving from the sea. I said to myself:
"You put yourself in this fix, by Joe, and you've got to take your humiliation and punishment like a man."
So this was the life at sea? Certainly, it was not what I had expected. I wondered if I had made a mistake. Well, mistake or no mistake, I had promised my father to wear the Emperor's uniform with honour, and I would not go home until I wore the Emperor's naval uniform with honour. But how far away from me now seemed epaulettes and gold braid.
The Niobe did not put in at a single port on our way out. After we passed through the English Channel, until we reached Western Australia, we saw nothing save sky and sea, the sky light or dark, the sea in quiet or in storm. In fact, we only came in sight of land once. This was when we sighted an island somewhere off the African coast. I could see palms, rows of palms, and white houses with red roofs and green shutters. I stood at the rail and gazed. What joy it must be to walk and breathe on that green island. It seemed an abode of all happy things. I was sure that living there must be a fairy princess. I was very much of a boy, and I had been reared on German stories. I was wretched, and yonder was a land so fair. It must be the haunt of a fairy princess. I stood with my elbows on the rail and my chin on my hands and dreamed of her.