Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/101

Rh We passed out through the Heads in brilliant sunshine, and had time to sit down to one meal and inspect each other ere mal de mer claimed its tribute. I, being what is called "a good sailor" with a passionate love of the sea, especially in stormy weather, and, I confess with shame, even liking the bilgy smell of a steamboat, do not know this terrible sickness of the sea, and experience only an impatient scorn of, and an utter lack of sympathy for, those who do. I really could not condescend to make such a nasty exhibition of myself as most others do, and, horrible as it may seem, I appear callously at every meal with a ravenous appetite, and am naturally regarded as a cold-hearted brute devoid of pity for human suffering. But how I hate those others who, after a few days' debauch in utter moral and physical degradation, appear at table again full of life and spirits as if they had done something heroic! Germans, too, are hopeless; they have no powers of resistance and go hopelessly, shamefully, to pieces as much in public as in private.

The deck was covered with long cane chairs under the awning, and one by one yellow, haggard, feeble figures appeared and collapsed into them, but this took some days; our one lady in the First Class was long of appearing.

We were a curious little community. In the Second Class were few passengers—two Englishmen and two Englishwomen bound for Singapore, and a few others. In the First Class we had Monsignor Coupé, or Coppée, the French Catholic Bishop of German New Guinea; Captain Dunbar, Commander of the German corvette, Moewe (Seagull), which patrols these seas; the distinguished Hungarian naturalist, Professor Biro Lajos (Ludwig Biro); Frau Wolff, wife of a German planter in New Britain; a