I believe that the primary influence of the quap upon us was to increase
the conductivity of our nerves, but that is a mere unjustifiable
speculation on my part. At any rate it gave a sort of east wind effect
to life. We all became irritable, clumsy, languid and disposed to
be impatient with our languor. We moored the brig to the rocks with
difficulty, and got aground on mud and decided to stick there and tow
off when we had done--the bottom was as greasy as butter. Our efforts
to fix up planks and sleepers in order to wheel the quap aboard were as
ill-conceived as that sort of work can be--and that sort of work can at
times be very ill-conceived. The captain had a superstitious fear of his
hold: he became wildly gesticulatory and expository and incompetent at
the bare thought of it. His shouts still echo in my memory, becoming as
each crisis approached less and less like any known tongue.
But I cannot now write the history of those days of blundering and toil:
of how Milton, one of the boys, fell from a plank to the beach, thirty
feet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm and I believe a rib,
of how I and Pollack set the limb and nursed him through the fever that
followed, of how one man after another succumbed to a feverish malaria,
and how I--by virtue of my scientific reputation--was obliged to play
the part of doctor and dose them with quinine, and then finding that
worse than nothing, with rum and small doses of Easton's Syrup, of which
there chanced to be a case of bottles aboard--Heaven and Gordon-Nasmyth
know why.
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