The fury of the tempest and the violence of the sea, which the boldest could not contemplate without feeling that the ship was every moment in more or less peril, kept the crew subdued, and they eat as best they could the provisions without complaint. However, it needed nothing less than a storm to keep them quiet; for on the second day a sea extinguished the galley-fire, and until the gale abated no cooking could be done; so that the men had to put up with cold water and biscuit. Hence all hands were thrown upon the ship's bread for two days, and the badness of it, therefore was made even more apparent than heretofore, when its wormy mouldiness was in some degree qualified by the nauseousness of bad salt pork and beef, and the sickly flavour of damaged tea.
As I had anticipated, the captain came round a little a few hours after his insulting attack upon me. I think his temper frightened him when it had reference to me. Like others of his breed, he was a bit of a cur at bottom: my character was a trifle beyond him, and he was ignorant enough to hate and fear what he could not understand. Be this as it may, he made some rough attempts at a rude kind of politeness when I went below to get some grog, and condescended to say that when I had been to sea as long as he, I would know that the most ungrateful rascals in the world were sailors; that every crew he had sailed with had always taken care to invent some grievance to growl over--either the provisions were bad, or the work too heavy, or the ship unseaworthy--and that long ago he had made up his mind never to pay attention to their complaints, since no sooner would one wrong be redressed, than another would be coined and shoved under his nose.
I took this opportunity of assuring him that I had never willingly listened to the complaints of the men, and that I was always annoyed when they spoke to me about the provisions, as I had nothing whatever to do with that matter; and that so far from my wishing to stir up the men into rebellion, my conduct had been uniformly influenced by the desire to conciliate them and represent their condition as very tolerable, so as to repress any tendency to disaffection which they might foment among themselves.