Our men have
become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded shadows of men. I should not
be surprised, in the end, to see Captain West turn tail and run
eastward around the world to Seattle. But Margaret smiles with
surety, and nods her head, and affirms that her father will win
around to 50 in the Pacific.
How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room
of iron in the 'midship-house is beyond me--just as it is beyond me
that the wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down
in their bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of
the watches.
Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty
miles due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a
driving gale, on the port tack. The glass is down to 28.58, and even
Mr. Pike acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters
he has ever experienced.
In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64
degrees or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a
favouring spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the
extreme-narrowing wedges of longitude.
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