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 lawgiver 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 deg. south in the Pacific had been reached,
Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly.
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