There was nothing to be done.  We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them.  We were packed like sardines.  There was nothing to do but rot or die—­that is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the first death.  On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whale-boat.  They were never heard of again.  In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.

That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight.  It was curious to see how we took it.  The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear.  The captain—­Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman—­became very nervous and voluble.  He actually got the twitches.  He was a large, fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful representation of a quivering jelly-mountain of fat.

The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey, and proceeded to stay drunk.  The theory was beautiful—­namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder.  And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the disease either.  The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.

It was a pretty time.  The sun, going into northern declination, was straight overhead.  There was no wind, except for frequent squalls, which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by deluging us with rain.  After each squall, the awful sun would come out, drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.

The steam was not nice.  It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and millions of germs.  We always took another drink when we saw it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff.  Also, we made it a rule to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the sharks that swarmed about us.

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out.  It is just as well, or I shouldn’t be alive now.  It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as you will see when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull through.  The other man was the heathen—­at least, that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the heathen’s existence.  But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl-buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companionway.  Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl-buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.