days' harrying of the seal-herd along the northern coasts of Japan
to Behring Sea.

Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle. The alcohol had been worked out of my
system, and from the moment the voyage began I had not known the
desire for a drink. I doubt if I even thought once about a drink.
Often, of course, the talk in the forecastle turned on drink, and
the men told of their more exciting or humorous drunks,
remembering such passages more keenly, with greater delight, than
all the other passages of their adventurous lives.

In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis. He
was a broken skipper. John Barleycorn had thrown him, and he was
winding up his career where he had begun it, in the forecastle.
His case made quite an impression on me. John Barleycorn did
other things beside kill a man. He hadn't killed Louis. He had
done much worse. He had robbed him of power and place and
comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to the hardship of
the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy breath
lasted, which promised to be for a long time.

We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic
peaks, jungle-clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the
reefs to the land-locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down
where lay a score or more of sea-gypsies like ourselves. The
scents of strange vegetation blew off the tropic land.
Aborigines, in queer outrigger canoes, and Japanese, in queerer
sampans, paddled about the bay and came aboard. It was my first
foreign land; I had won to the other side of the world, and I