Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 1.djvu/100

 CHAPTER IV.

first day or two after our departure, I had a repetition of my old complaint, sea-sickness. Here the dogs managed better than I. They could walk the deck; I was unable. Perhaps four props to my two considerably helped them. But the first night out we had a terrible shaking. Davis's Strait was more like the broad ocean, and certainly as boisterous. If this Strait and Baffin's Bay were, as I suggest, called "Davis and Baffin's Sea," then could its billows roll high as the heavens, deep as the lowest depths, without our once thinking of their assuming to be what they are not.

At about midnight I had bid farewell to Greenland, and—to my supper! Talk of "perpetual motion!" Why has the world been so long in seeking out so simple a problem? Ask me—I used to say—ask poor sea-sick me if I believe in perpetual motion. A ship at sea is perpetually jumping up and down, which motion would run a saw-mill—is perpetually rolling, and this would serve to turn a grindstone—and is perpetually creaking, see-sawing, pitching forward, and swinging backward. During the night, "things in general" got capsized. I would not like to swear that the George Henry turned a "summerset," but, on my honour, I can say that when I retired to my berth, an India-rubber cup, lashed firmly on my writing-table, and holding a beautiful Greenland bouquet in water, was the next morning emptied of its contents, and every flower and drop of water scattered far and near, though