"Comes in with strong wind from SSE with rain squalls. Very ugly sea on.
Double reefed the Topsails, reefed the courses and furled the mainsail.
At six p.m. shipped a very heavy sea that carried away the bulwarks on
the larboard quarter and stove those on the starboard quarter and
amidships ... upper cabin filled with water. Through the night strong
gales.... Lightning at all points of the compass."

The memory of this night, six days out from Manilla to Hong Kong, was
clearer than the actuality of the room in which he sat, an old man with
his activity, his strength, his manhood, far behind him, a hulk.

"At ten split the mainsail in pieces. Close reefed the fore and
double reefed the main-topsails. Rising gales and heavy head sea.
Shipping a great quantity of water and leaking considerable. Bent a
new mainsail and set it. Reefed and set the jib. Pumping near two
thousand strokes an hour.

"October seventh, Sunday. Comes in with strong gales and a heavy head
sea. Both officers crippled and man laid up. Through the night the same.
Leaking badly. A great number of junks in sight ... and so at five p.m.
come to anchor."

He had been a good man then, sixteen days on the quarter-deck without
going below; insensible to ice or fever or weariness. He had been
autocratic, too; and had his boy servant carrying areca nuts, chunam
and tobacco in two silk bags, another with a fan and a third holding
an umbrella. Such things were all over now, he understood, in this
driving age.

His mind continually returned to Gerrit, to dwell on the vast number of