I was terribly vexed by this rudeness, which I was powerless to resist, and regretted my indiscretion in entering the forecastle after the politic resolutions I had formed.  However, Captain Coxon’s ferocity was nothing new to me; truly I believed he was not quite right in his mind, and expected, as in former cases, that he would come round a bit by-and-by when his insane temper had passed.  Still his insinuations were highly dangerous, not to speak of their offensiveness.  It was no joke to be charged, even by a madman, with striving to arouse the crew to mutiny.  Nevertheless I tried to console myself as best I could by reflecting that he could not prove his charges; that I need only to endure his insolence for a few weeks, and that there was always a law to vindicate me and punish him, should his evil temper betray him into any acts of cruelty against me.

The gale, at times the severest that I was ever in, lasted three days; during which the ship drove something like eighty miles to the northwest.  The sea on the afternoon of the third day was appalling:  had the ship attempted to run, she would have been pooped and smothered in a minute; but lying close, she rode fairly well, though there were moments when I held my breath as she sunk in a hollow like a coal-mine, filled with the astounding noise of boiling water,—­really believing that the immense waves which came hurtling towards us with solid, sharp, transparent ridges, out of which the wind tore lumps of water and flung them through the rigging of the ship, must overwhelm the vessel before she could rise to it.

The fury of the tempest and the violence of the sea, which the boldest could not contemplate without feeling that the ship was every moment in more or less peril, kept the crew subdued; and they eat as best they could the provisions, without complaint.  However, it needed nothing less than a storm to keep them quiet:  for on the second day a sea extinguished the galley fire, and until the gale abated no cooking could be done; so that the men had to put up with cold water and biscuit.  Hence all hands were thrown upon the ship’s bread for two days; and the badness of it, therefore, was made even more apparent than heretofore, when its wormy moldiness was in some degree qualified by the nauseousness of bad salt pork and beef and the sickly flavor of damaged tea.

As I had anticipated, the captain came round a little a few hours after his insulting attack upon me.  I think his temper frightened him when it had reference to me.  Like others of his breed, he was a bit of a cur at the bottom.  My character was a trifle beyond him; and he was ignorant enough to hate and fear what he could not understand.  Be this as it may, he made some rough attempts at a rude kind of politeness when I went below to get some grog, and condescended to say that when I had been to sea as long as he, I would know that the most ungrateful rascals in the world were sailors; that every crew he had sailed with had always taken care to invent some grievance to growl over:  either the provisions were bad, or the work too heavy, or the ship unseaworthy; and that long ago he had made up his mind never to pay attention to their complaints, since no sooner would one wrong be redressed than another would be coined and shoved under his nose.