The wind at length calmed sufficiently to encourage our Captain to venture out, and we were soon battling with the rolling waves, far out of sight of land.  For awhile the novelty of the scene fascinated me.  I was at last on the ocean, of which I had heard, read and imagined so much.  The creaking cordage, the straining engine, the plunging ship, the wild waste of tumbling billows, everyone apparently racing to where our tossing bark was struggling to maintain herself, all had an entrancing interest for me, and I tried to recall Byron’s sublime apostrophe to the ocean: 

          Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
          Classes itself in tempest:  in all time,
          Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,
          Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
          Dark-heaving—­boundless, endless, and sublime—­
          The image of eternity—­the throne
          Of the invisible; even from out thy slime
          The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
          Obey thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone,

Just then, my reverie was broken by the strong hand of the gruff Captain of, the vessel descending upon my shoulder, and he said: 

“See, here, youngster!  Ain’t you the fellow that was put in command of these men?”

I acknowledged such to be the case.

“Well,” said the Captain; “I want you to ’tend to your business and straighten them around, so that we can clean off the decks.”

I turned from the bulwark over which I had been contemplating the vasty deep, and saw the sorriest, most woe-begone lot that the imagination can conceive.  Every mother’s son was wretchedly sea-sick.  They were paying the penalty of their overfeeding in Wilmington; and every face looked as if its owner was discovering for the first time what the real lower depths of human misery was.  They all seemed afraid they would not die; as if they were praying for death, but feeling certain that he was going back on them in a most shameful way.

We straightened them around a little, washed them and the decks off with a hose, and then I started down in the hold to see how matters were with the six hundred down there.  The boys there were much sicker than those on deck.  As I lifted the hatch there rose an odor which appeared strong enough to raise the plank itself.  Every onion that had been issued to us in Wilmington seemed to lie down there in the last stages of decomposition.  All of the seventy distinct smells which Coleridge counted at Cologne might have been counted in any given cubic foot of atmosphere, while the next foot would have an entirely different and equally demonstrative “bouquet.”

I recoiled, and leaned against the bulwark, but soon summoned up courage enough to go half-way down the ladder, and shout out in as stern a tone as I could command: 

“Here, now!  I want you fellows to straighten around there, right off, and help clean up!”