It's a lighthouse now. If a man doesn't mind a
curve in his view and a few pin-head islands, there's nothing
particular to interrupt his view half round the world. The Andes make
a jagged line on the east, and ten of them are volcanoes. Those snow
mountains and two or three ocean currents got together, and arranged
it with the equator that one part of the year should be a good deal
like another there, and all the months behave respectful, and the
Tower of Ananias have a breeze. It's a handsome position with a
picked climate.
The scurvy is a disease not so common now, but it used to act as if
all the bad salt pork you'd eaten were coming out through the skin,
till you looked like a Stilton cheese, and what you wanted was to be
fed on vegetables, and put ashore so as to get the bilge-water dried
out. Probably that wouldn't be possible, and you'd be sewed up in
canvas, and resemble an exclamation point, and be dropped overboard
to punctuate the end of the story. Chunk! you goes, and that's the
end of you.
Ship's fever is a nautical brand of typhoid, due to bad conditions
aboard. The best thing for it is to get out of those conditions.
Craney had the scurvy, and I had ship's fever.
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