To the Ends of the Earth Read Online Free PDF

bruised the palm is, you would call it my larboard hand I believe. I have a bruise on the larboard hand! Is that not perfectly nautical? But I shall follow your first advice. I shall take some food first with a glass of brandy, then turn in to keep my limbs entire. You will drink with me, sir?”
    Cumbershum shook his head.
    “I go on watch,” he said. “But do you settle your stomach . However, there is one more thing. Have a care I beg you of Wheeler’s paregoric. It is the very strongest stuff, and as the voyage goes on the price will increase out of all reason. Steward—what’s your name—Bates! A glass of brandy for Mr Talbot!”
    He left me then with as courteous an inclination of the head as you would expect from a man leaning like the pitch of a roof. It was a sight to make one bosky out of hand. Indeed, the warming properties of strong drink give it a more seductive appeal at sea than it ever has ashore, I think. So I determined with that glass to regulate my use of it. I turned warily in my fastened seat and inspected the world of furious water that stretched and slanted beyond our stern window. I must own that it afforded me the scantiest consolation; the more so as I reflected that in the happiest outcome of our voyage there was not a single billow , wave, swell, comber that I shall cross in one direction without having, in a few years time, to cross it in the other ! I sat for a great while eyeing my brandy, staring into its aromatic and tiny pool of liquid. I found little comfort in sight at that time except the evident fact that our other passengers were even more lethargic than I was. Thethought at once determined me to eat. I got down some nearly fresh bread and a little mild cheese. On top of this I swallowed my brandy and gave my stomach a dare to misbehave ; and so frightened it with the threat of an addiction to small ale, thence to brandy, then to Wheeler’s paregoric and after that to the ultimate destructiveness of an habitual recourse, Lord help us, to laudanum that the poor, misused organ lay as quiet as a mouse that hears a kitchen-maid rattle the fire in the morning! I turned in and got my head down and turned out and ate; then toiled at these very pages by the light of my candle—giving your lordship, I doubt it not, a queasy piece of “living through” me for which I am as heartily sorry as yourself could be! I believe the whole ship, from the farm animals up or down to your humble servant, is nauseated to one degree or another—always excepting of course the leaning and streaming tarpaulins.

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    And how is your lordship today? In the best of health and spirits, I trust, as I am! There is such a crowd of events at the back of my mind, tongue, pen, what you will, that my greatest difficulty is to know how to get them on the paper! In brief, all things about our wooden world have altered for the better. I do not mean that I have got my sea legs ; for even now that I understand the physical laws of our motion they continue to exhaust me! But the motion itself is easier. It was some time in the hours of darkness that I woke—a shouted order perhaps—and feeling if anything even more stretched on the rack of our lumbering, bullying progress. For days, as I lay, there had come at irregular intervals a kind of impediment from our watery shoulderings that I cannot describe except to say it was as if our carriage wheels had caught for a moment on the drag, then released themselves. It was a movement that as I lay in my trough, my bunk, my feet to our stern, my head to our bows—a movement that would thrust my head more firmly into the pillow, which being made of granite transmitted the impulsion throughout the remainder of my person.
    Even though I now understood the cause, the repetition was unutterably wearisome. But as I awoke there were loud movements on deck, the thundering of many feet, then shouted orders prolonged into what one might suppose to be the vociferations of the damned. I