aforethought on my part. I had played John Barleycorn a trick.
And it showed that I was listening ever so slightly to the faint
warnings that were beginning to arise in my consciousness.
Of course, I veiled the situation to myself and excused myself to
John Barleycorn. And I was very scientific about it. I said that
I would drink only while in ports. During the dry sea-stretches
my system would be cleansed of the alcohol that soaked it, so that
when I reached a port I should be in shape to enjoy John
Barleycorn more thoroughly. His bite would be sharper, his kick
keener and more delicious.
We were twenty-seven days on the traverse between San Francisco
and Honolulu. After the first day out, the thought of a drink
never troubled me. This I take to show how intrinsically I am not
an alcoholic. Sometimes, during the traverse, looking ahead and
anticipating the delightful lanai luncheons and dinners of Hawaii
(I had been there a couple of times before), I thought, naturally,
of the drinks that would precede those meals. I did not think of
those drinks with any yearning, with any irk at the length of the
voyage. I merely thought they would be nice and jolly, part of
the atmosphere of a proper meal.
Thus, once again I proved to my complete satisfaction that I was
John Barleycorn’s master. I could drink when I wanted, refrain
when I wanted. Therefore I would continue to drink when I wanted.
Some five months were spent in the various islands of the Hawaiian
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group. Being ashore, I drank. I even drank a bit more than I had
been accustomed to drink in California prior to the voyage. The
people in Hawaii seemed to drink a bit more, on the average, than
the people in more temperate latitudes. I do not intend the pun,
and can awkwardly revise the statement to “latitudes more remote
from the equator;” Yet Hawaii is only sub-tropical. The deeper I
got into the tropics, the deeper I found men drank, the deeper I
drank myself.
From Hawaii we sailed for the Marquesas. The traverse occupied
sixty days. For sixty days we never raised land, a sail, nor a
steamer smoke. But early in those sixty days the cook, giving an
overhauling to the galley, made a find. Down in the bottom of a
deep locker he found a dozen bottles of angelica and muscatel.
These had come down from the kitchen cellar of the ranch along
with the home-preserved fruits and jellies. Six months in the
galley heat had effected some sort of a change in the thick sweet
wine–branded it, I imagine.
I took a taste. Delicious! And thereafter, once each day, at
twelve o’clock, after our observations were worked up and the
Snark’s position charted, I drank half a tumbler of the stuff. It
had a rare kick to it. It warmed the cockles of my geniality and
put a fairer face on the truly fair face of the sea. Each
morning, below, sweating out my thousand words, I found myself
looking forward to that twelve o’clock event of the day.
T
he trouble was I had to share the stuff, and the length of the
traverse was doubtful. I regretted that there were not more than
a dozen bottles. And when they were gone I even regretted that I
had shared any of it. I was thirsty for the alcohol, and eager to
arrive in the Marquesas.
So it was that I reached the Marquesas the possessor of a real
man’s size thirst. And in the Marquesas were several white men, a
lot of sickly natives, much magnificent scenery, plenty of trade
rum, an immense quantity of absinthe, but neither whisky nor gin.
The trade rum scorched the skin off one’s mouth. I know, because
I tried it. But I had ever been plastic, and I accepted the
absinthe. The trouble with the stuff was that I had to take such
inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect.
From the Marquesas I sailed with sufficient absinthe in ballast to
last me to Tahiti, where I outfitted with Scotch and American
whisky, and thereafter there were no dry stretches between ports.
But please do not misunderstand. There was no drunkenness, as
drunkenness is ordinarily understood–no staggering and rolling
around, no befuddlement of the senses. The skilled and seasoned
drinker, with a strong constitution, never descends to anything
like that. He drinks to feel good, to get a pleasant jingle, and
no more than that. The things he carefully avoids are the nausea
of over-drinking, the after-effect of over-drinking, the
helplessness and loss of pride of over-drinking.
What the skilled and seasoned drinker achieves is a discreet and
canny semi-intoxication. And he does it by the twelve-month
around without any apparent penalty. There are hundreds of
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thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in
clubs, hotels, and in their own homes–men who are never drunk,
and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely
sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that
they are beating the game.
On the sea-stretches I was fairly abstemious; but ashore I drank
more. I seemed to need more, anyway, in the tropics. This is a
common experience, for the excessive consumption of alcohol in the
tropics by white men is a notorious fact. The tropics is no place
for white-skinned men. Their skin-pigment does not protect them
against the excessive white light of the sun. The ultra-violet
rays, and other high-velocity and invisible rays from the upper
end of the spectrum, rip and tear through their tissues, just as
the X-ray ripped and tore through the tissues of so many
experimenters before they learned the danger.
White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. They
become savage, merciless. They commit monstrous acts of cruelty
that they would never dream of committing in their original
temperate climate. They become nervous, irritable, and less
moral. And they drink as they never drank before. Drinking is
one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white
men are exposed too long to too much white light. The increase of
alcoholic consumption is automatic. The tropics is no place for a
long sojourn. They seem doomed to die anyway, and the heavy
drinking expedites the process. They don’t reason about it. They
just do it.
The sun sickness got me, despite the fact that I had been in the
tropics only a couple of years. I drank heavily during this time,
but right here I wish to forestall misunderstanding. The drinking
was not the cause of the sickness, nor of the abandonment of the
voyage. I was strong as a bull, and for many months I fought the
sun sickness that was ripping and tearing my surface and nervous
tissues to pieces. All through the New Hebrides and the Solomons
and up among the atolls on the Line, during this period under a
tropic sun, rotten with malaria, and suffering from a few minor
afflictions such as Biblical leprosy with the silvery skin, I did
the work of five men.
To navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and
unlighted coasts of the coral seas is a man’s work in itself. I
was the only navigator on board. There was no one to check me up
on the working out of my observations, nor with whom I could
advise in the ticklish darkness among uncharted reefs and shoals.
And I stood all watches. There was no sea-man on board whom I
could trust to stand a mate’s watch. I was mate as well as
captain. Twenty-four hours a day were the watches I stood at sea,
catching cat-naps when I might. Third, I was doctor. And let me
say right here that the doctor’s job on the Snark at that time was
a man’s job. All on board suffered from malaria–the real,
tropical malaria that can kill in three months. All on board
suffered from perforating ulcers and from the maddening itch of
ngari-ngari. A Japanese cook went insane from his too numerous
afflictions. One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death’s door
with blackwater fever. Oh, yes, it was a full man’s job, and I
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dosed and doctored, and pulled teeth, and dragged my patients
through mild little things like ptomaine poisoning.
Fourth, I was a writer. I sweated out my thousand words a day,
every day, except when the shock of fever smote me, or a couple of
nasty squalls smote the Snark, in the morning. Fifth, I was a
traveller and a writer, eager to see things and to gather material
into my note-books. And, sixth, I was master and owner of the
craft that was visiting strange places where visitors are rare and
where visitors are made much of. So here I had to hold up the