We all tried to keep one another cheered up as much as possible. Anyone who has been seasick can in some measure appreciate our predicament. There is something amusing about seasickness—when somebody else is afflicted. At first, you fear you will die; then, after it has a good hold on you, you fear you won't die; and you feel that you are all stomach, and that that stomach is emptying itself faster than it could possibly be filled. The person who is not actually in the throes of seasickness can have no sympathy with the person who is so afflicted. I used to go up to Mrs. London when she was at the wheel, and ask her if I should not prepare for her dinner a nice piece of fat pork with a string tied to it. The effect was magical. Immediately, she would clap her hands over her mouth and make for the rail. There is something infectious about seasickness. I would have to go join her myself, and sometimes Jack would come with us.
On one occasion, I almost gave up, and expressed to Jack the wish that I could see land. He replied: "Never mind, Martin, we are not over two miles from land now;" and when I asked him which way, he said: "Straight down, Martin, straight down."
One whole day I slept, or tried to sleep, in the life-boat. p058 But the life-boat was a joke. By this time we realised that if a really severe storm should strike us, the life-boat would be the first thing to go, and our only resource in case of foundering would be the launch, which is to say, that had the Snark gone down, we would have gone down with it. So our only hope was in fair weather and the pumps.
The bath-room had long since gone out of commission. The first day out, the big iron levers that controlled the sea-valves and the bath-pumps broke into splinters. Jack's heart was sore at this, for he had planned that bath-room carefully, and had been to much expense in fitting it up. Another thing that would have dashed most skippers' spirits was the fact that the specially ordered planking from Puget Sound, warranted to have no butts, was literally crowded with butts. But Jack did not let any of these things trouble him much; he merely commented on them, and then set himself to make the best of the voyage. Luckily, we were not becalmed. Had this misfortune been added to the rest, it might have taken us sixty days or more to reach Honolulu.
A little over a week out, a gale struck us, and carried away the jib and staysail. Everybody worked; the boat was creaking and groaning, water spouting in everywhere, and the cockpit filled with water. The engine wouldn't work, and nothing else worked. This gale was a wonderful experience for me. The little boat would go down in the trough of the wave, and p059 I would gaze up and see the water coming in a massive cone, a million tons of water, looking a hundred feet high. It seemed to overtop our mainmast several times and more. I felt absolutely certain that when that mass of water hit us, we would be gone; but each time our stout little craft would climb the side of the wave until we reached the top, and then would start down the opposite side so rapidly that it produced that peculiar feeling one experiences when going down a Shoot-the-Chutes or the steep incline of a Roller-Coaster. In fact, seasickness is nothing more than this sensation aggravated to a point where it is painful. We were pitched around with great violence—sometimes we would be away over on one side until the water came pouring in the scuppers; and again, the boat would rush downward at such a rate of speed that I just knew we were making for that bottom Mr. London had spoken of; then we would go up again, each time to my surprise, because I was satisfied that we were as good as dead at least twice to each wave we rode. During this storm, the thought came to me that just a year before, on May 1, I was on a big cattle-steamer, going east on the Atlantic; and here I was, a year later, on a fish-bobber, in the middle of the Pacific, going—where? But the sea was not in existence that could swamp us. When the storm broke away the next day, and the sun arose bright and clear, everyone seemed to feel better and to take renewed interest in life. p060
We had not been long out of port before we became convinced that we had no navigator aboard. Captain Eames was supposed to be the navigator, but the navigation of a small boat is difficult and Jack had to assist him in the work. On certain days we made splendid headway and seemed to have covered considerable distance but our observations and markings on the chart showed that we had not done nearly as well as we supposed. On the other hand, there were days when it had been practically calm, and our records would show that we had fairly whirled over the water. The principles of navigation are fairly simple—and misunderstood by most people. Before we had reached Honolulu, everyone in the boat was navigating, except Tochigi. Of course, most of our mistakes had their roots in the fact that the boat's tossing threw our observations out of line, and our eyes were rather too near to the water. Of course, too, our record of time on board was sadly perturbed, despite our turning the ship's clock back about ten minutes each day.
And still we saw no fish of any sort. Jack could not understand it. He had been in these latitudes before, and always had seen porpoises and dolphins and flying fish, as well as sharks and bonita. But the ocean was absolutely bare in every direction. We were in a watery desert. It was not until we got to latitude 19° that we saw the first flying fish, and he was all by himself.
On Thursday, May 2, we felt that we were certainly p061 in the trade winds. We went dead ahead of the breeze, with all the sails set except the mizzen, and doing what old sailors, men of forty years on the sea, declare cannot be done—racing along with no one at the wheel. We simply set the wheel over to suit the wind, without even lashing it; and then all went below to supper, and to play cribbage. By this time I had learned a number of new dishes. Tochigi showed me the Japanese way of preparing rice, and it beat anything I had yet cooked. All were feeling in high spirits. The sickness had left us, and the boat looked tidier than at any time since leaving Frisco, for we had spent the day in scrubbing the floors, and generally cleaning things up.
When it came to the actual test, we found that the provisions of the Snark were not exactly adapted to that kind of trip. The duty of provisioning the boat had been left to Mrs. London and myself, and I fear that in the buying we lost all sense of proportion. We had bought an enormous crate of cabbages (which, as I have said, speedily found its way into the sea), and a whole case of lemons; and I had made out the list of spices and seasonings, all of which were purchased, enough to run the Delmonico for a year. The amount of pepper we had aboard would last a good-sized family through several lifetimes. When we completed the voyage, we had pepper to throw overboard, and I'll bet the fish in that vicinity have been coughing and sneezing ever since. p062