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 CHAPTER III

THERE'S A LOOK in every skipper's eye as he sizes up his new medical officer that is usually compounded of one part pessimism, one part wariness, and one part hope.

The hope is of the incurable nautical variety, endemic among sailors. It is what keeps them going in all weathers and in the face of innumerable misadventures. Undoubtedly it is the quality which made old-time philosophers select a ship's anchor as a symbol of hope. It also — as Navy doctors have reason to know — gets its possessors into innumerable difficulties ashore. But those stories come later.

That look in the skipper's eye reveals that, in spite of all previous experience, he is still looking for the perfect ship's surgeon. When he was a boy he probably read Treasure Island, and he has never forgotten the immortal and invaluable Dr. Livesey.

At Annapolis, his attention was called to the exploits of Sir Francis Drake, through which he made acquaintance with doughty James Wood, of the Garland, chief surgeon of El Draque's fleet, who succumbed to the same epidemic of yellow fever on the day before it killed the mighty mariner whom Spain could not defeat. And to Captain Cook and the useful Mr. Anderson, chief surgeon of the expedition, whose understanding of the psychology of seamen inspired him to limit the ship's supply of sauerkraut to the officers' mess. With the inevitable result, the crew demanded a 36