I believe I have said somewhere in this letter that my soul didn’t leap
to my lips when I went out to meet the ocean. I regret to say that my
breakfast did. I do not know whether any writer has addressed himself to
sea-sickness. I am certain that no writer of sacred or profane
literature can do it sufficient injustice. Walt Whitman might do it.
He’s better on the yawp than any poet I know. Never tell me again that
hell is a lake of fire and brimstone. Eternal punishment means riding on
a rough sea, in a steamer that don’t roll well, without a
copper-bottomed stomach, and a self-acting stop-valve in the throat. To
have been jostled about in a lake of fire would have been real cheerful
business compared to the unutterable anguish that I suffered for three
days. I do believe that if I had tied a cannon-ball to a crumb of bread
and swallowed them both, the crumb would have come prancing to the front
again, and brought the cannon-ball with it. It at last became a sort of
dismal joke to send anything down. But this was not what made it so hard
to bear. It was the abject degradation that it brought upon me. The
absolute prostration of every mental, moral and physical activity, of
every emotion, impulse and ambition; the reduction of a system that
boasted of some nervous power and of excessive tone, to the condition of
a wet dish-clout,—these were the things that made sea-sickness a misery
beyond the power of words. For three days I lay like an old volcano,
still, desolate and haggard; but with an exceedingly active crater. I
was brought to that condition which Chesterfield says is the finest
pitch to which a gentleman can be brought, that sublime pitch of
indifference that enables him to hear of the loss of an estate, or a
poodle dog, with the same feeling. Nothing disturbs the man who is
sea-sick. He blinks in the face of disaster, and yawps at death itself.
He actually longs for sensation. To stick him with a pin, or drop ice
down his back, would be a mercy. He spraddles madly over the ship,
flabbing himself like a mollusk over everything he stumbles on, and
knows not night or morning. As far as I was concerned, I was seized with
a yawning that came very near proving fatal. I was taken with a longing
to turn myself wrong-side outwards, and hang myself on the taffrail.
Several times I was on the point of doing it; but I struggled against it
and saved myself.