On the sea-stretches I was fairly abstemious;but ashore I drank more.I seemed to need more,anyway,in the tropics.This is a common experience,for the excessive consumption of alcohol in the tropics by white men is a notorious fact.The tropics is no place for white-skinned men.Their skin-pigment does not protect them against the excessive white light of the sun.The ultra-violet rays,and other high-velocity and invisible rays from the upper end of the spectrum,rip and tear through their tissues,just as the X-ray ripped and tore through the tissues of so many experimenters before they learned the danger.
White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature.They become savage,merciless.They commit monstrous acts of cruelty that they would never dream of committing in their original temperate climate.They become nervous,irritable,and less moral.And they drink as they never drank before.Drinking is one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white men are exposed too long to too much white light.The increase of alcoholic consumption is automatic.The tropics is no place for a long sojourn.They seem doomed to die anyway,and the heavy drinking expedites the process.They don't reason about it.They just do it.
The sun sickness got me,despite the fact that I had been in the tropics only a couple of years.I drank heavily during this time,but right here I wish to forestall misunderstanding.The drinking was not the cause of the sickness,nor of the abandonment of the voyage.I was strong as a bull,and for many months I fought the sun sickness that was ripping and tearing my surface and nervous tissues to pieces.All through the New Hebrides and the Solomons and up among the atolls on the Line,during this period under a tropic sun,rotten with malaria,and suffering from a few minor afflictions such as Biblical leprosy with the silvery skin,I did the work of five men.
To navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and unlighted coasts of the coral seas is a man's work in itself.Iwas the only navigator on board.There was no one to check me up on the working out of my observations,nor with whom I could advise in the ticklish darkness among uncharted reefs and shoals.
And I stood all watches.There was no sea-man on board whom Icould trust to stand a mate's watch.I was mate as well as captain.Twenty-four hours a day were the watches I stood at sea,catching cat-naps when I might.Third,I was doctor.And let me say right here that the doctor's job on the Snark at that time was a man's job.All on board suffered from malaria--the real,tropical malaria that can kill in three months.All on board suffered from perforating ulcers and from the maddening itch of ngari-ngari.A Japanese cook went insane from his too numerous afflictions.One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death's door with blackwater fever.Oh,yes,it was a full man's job,and Idosed and doctored,and pulled teeth,and dragged my patients through mild little things like ptomaine poisoning.
Fourth,I was a writer.I sweated out my thousand words a day,every day,except when the shock of fever smote me,or a couple of nasty squalls smote the Snark,in the morning.Fifth,I was a traveller and a writer,eager to see things and to gather material into my note-books.And,sixth,I was master and owner of the craft that was visiting strange places where visitors are rare and where visitors are made much of.So here I had to hold up the social end,entertain on board,be entertained ashore by planters,traders,governors,captains of war vessels,kinky-headed cannibal kings,and prime ministers sometimes fortunate enough to be clad in cotton shifts.
Of course I drank.I drank with my guests and hosts.Also,Idrank by myself.Doing the work of five men,I thought,entitled me to drink.Alcohol was good for a man who over-worked.I noted its effect on my small crew,when,breaking their backs and hearts at heaving up anchor in forty fathoms,they knocked off gasping and trembling at the end of half an hour and had new life put into them by stiff jolts of rum.They caught their breaths,wiped their mouths,and went to it again with a will.And when we careened the Snark and had to work in the water to our necks between shocks of fever,I noted how raw trade rum helped the work along.
And here again we come to another side of many-sided John Barleycorn.On the face of it,he gives something for nothing.
Where no strength remains he finds new strength.The wearied one rises to greater effort.For the time being there is an actual accession of strength.I remember passing coal on an ocean steamer through eight days of hell,during which time we coal-passers were kept to the job by being fed with whisky.We toiled half drunk all the time.And without the whisky we could not have passed the coal.
This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength.
It is real strength.But it is manufactured out of the sources of strength,and it must ultimately be paid for,and with interest.
But what weary human will look so far ahead?He takes this apparently miraculous accession of strength at its face value.
And many an overworked business and professional man,as well as a harried common labourer,has travelled John Barleycorn's death road because of this mistake.