"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.
"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.
"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile. "He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."
"Remember that night off Vigo?"
"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was responsible for the saving of his ship.
"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.
"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.
"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."
Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks, holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come—No. It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty—I thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.
"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"