Potatoes!  I had managed to forget them.  In a moment I felt plunged into corruption up to my neck.  Mr. Burns was making eyes at me behind the pilot’s back.

Finally, he obtained a ton, and paid ten pounds for it.  This was twice the price of my bargain with Jacobus.  The spirit of covetousness woke up in me.  That night, in harbour, before I slept, the Custom House galley came alongside.  While his underlings were putting seals on the storerooms, the officer in charge took me aside confidentially.  “I say, Captain, you don’t happen to have any potatoes to sell.”

Clearly there was a potato famine in the land.  I let him have a ton for twelve pounds and he went away joyfully.  That night I dreamt of a pile of gold in the form of a grave in which a girl was buried, and woke up callous with greed.  On calling at my ship-broker’s office, that man, after the usual business had been transacted, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead.

“I was thinking, Captain, that coming from the Pearl of the Ocean you may have some potatoes to sell.”

I said negligently:  “Oh, yes, I could spare you a ton.  Fifteen pounds.”

He exclaimed:  “I say!” But after studying my face for a while accepted my terms with a faint grimace.  It seems that these people could not exist without potatoes.  I could.  I didn’t want to see a potato as long as I lived; but the demon of lucre had taken possession of me.  How the news got about I don’t know, but, returning on board rather late, I found a small group of men of the coster type hanging about the waist, while Mr. Burns walked to and fro the quarterdeck loftily, keeping a triumphant eye on them.  They had come to buy potatoes.

“These chaps have been waiting here in the sun for hours,” Burns whispered to me excitedly.  “They have drank the water-cask dry.  Don’t you throw away your chances, sir.  You are too good-natured.”

I selected a man with thick legs and a man with a cast in his eye to negotiate with; simply because they were easily distinguishable from the rest.  “You have the money on you?” I inquired, before taking them down into the cabin.

“Yes, sir,” they answered in one voice, slapping their pockets.  I liked their air of quiet determination.  Long before the end of the day all the potatoes were sold at about three times the price I had paid for them.  Mr. Burns, feverish and exulting, congratulated himself on his skilful care of my commercial venture, but hinted plainly that I ought to have made more of it.

That night I did not sleep very well.  I thought of Jacobus by fits and starts, between snatches of dreams concerned with castaways starving on a desert island covered with flowers.  It was extremely unpleasant.  In the morning, tired and unrefreshed, I sat down and wrote a long letter to my owners, giving them a carefully-thought-out scheme for the ship’s employment in the East and about the China Seas for the next two years.  I spent the day at that task and felt somewhat more at peace when it was done.