Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon
him. Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent. The scowls
were for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his
existence, which was make westing. He was a big, hairy brute, and the
sight of him was not stimulating to the other's appetite. He looked
upon George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so, once each meal, savagely
transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.

Nor did the mate prove a first aid to a languid appetite. Joshua
Higgins by name, a seaman by profession and pull, but a pot-wolloper
by capacity, he was a loose-jointed, sniffling creature, heartless and
selfish and cowardly, without a soul, in fear of his life of Dan Cullen,
and a bully over the sailors, who knew that behind the mate was Captain
Cullen, the law-giver and compeller, the driver and the destroyer, the
incarnation of a dozen bucko mates. In that wild weather at the southern
end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing. His grimy face usually
robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate.
Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain
Cullen's eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with
making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory
thereto. Whether the mate's face was clean or dirty had no bearing
upon westing. Later on, when 50 degrees south in the Pacific had been
reached, Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly. In the
meantime, at the cabin table, where gray twilight alternated with
lamplight while the lamps were being filled, George Dorety sat between
the two men, one a tiger and the other a hyena, and wondered why God had
made them. The second mate, Matthew Turner, was a true sailor and a man,
but George Dorety did not have the solace of his company, for he ate by
himself, solitary, when they had finished.

On Saturday morning, July 24, George Dorety awoke to a feeling of life
and headlong movement. On deck he found the Mary Rogers running off
before a howling south-easter. Nothing was set but the lower topsails
and the foresail. It was all she could stand, yet she was making
fourteen knots, as Mr. Turner shouted in Dorety's ear when he came on
deck. And it was all westing. She was going around the Horn at last...
if the wind held. Mr. Turner looked happy. The end of the struggle was
in sight. But Captain Cullen did not look happy. He scowled at D