Before leaving the islands, we shipped a negro boat-steerer to take the place of the Night King. He was coal black, had a wild roll to his eyes, an explosive, spluttering way of talking, looked strikingly like a great ape, and had little more than intelligence. His feet had the reputation of being the largest feet in the Hawaiian Islands. When I had seen them I was prepared to believe they were the largest in the world. He was "Big Foot" Louis, and the nickname stuck to him during the voyage. He came aboard barefooted. I don't know whether he could find any shoes in the islands big enough to fit him or not. Anyway, he didn't need shoes in the tropics.  
When we began to get north into cold weather he needed them badly, and there were none on board large enough for him to get his toes in. The captain went through his stock of Eskimo boots, made of hide and very , but they were too small. When we entered the region of snow, Louis was still running about the deck barefooted. As a last resort he sewed himself a pair of canvas shoes—regular meal sacks—and wore them through snow and and during the cold season when we were in the grip of the Behring Sea ice pack. Up around Behring straits the captain hired an Eskimo to make a pair of walrus hide boots big enough for Louis to wear, and Louis wore them until we got back to San Francisco and went in them. I met him wandering along Pacific Street in his walrus hides. However, he soon found a pair of brogans which he could wear with more or less comfort.
 
One night while I was knocking about the Barbary Coast with my shipmates we heard dance music and the sound of revelry coming from behind the swinging doors of the Bow Bells saloon, a free-and-easy resort. We stepped inside. Waltzing around the room with the grace of a young bowhead out of water was "Big-Foot" Louis, his arm around the waist of a negress, and on his feet nothing but a pair of red socks. We wondered what had become of his shoes and spied them on the piano, which the "professor" was vigorously strumming. Louis seemed to be having more fun than anybody, and was to the titters of the crowd and to the fact that it was not de rigueur on the Barbary Coast to dance in one's socks.
 
We left the Hawaiian Islands late in March and, straight north, soon left the tropics behind, never to see them again on the voyage. As we into the "roaring forties" we struck our first violent storm. The fury of the compelled us to heave to under staysails and drift, lying in the troughs of the seas and riding the waves sidewise. The storm was to me a revelation of what an ocean gale could be. Old sailors declared they never had seen anything worse. The wind and whistled in the rigging like a banshee. It was impossible to hear ordinary talk and the men had to yell into each other's ears. We put out oil bags along the weather side to keep the waves from breaking. But despite the oil that spread from them over the water, giant seas frequently broke over the brig. One crushed the waist boat into wood and sent its fragments flying all over the deck. We were fortunate to have several other extra boats in the hold against just such an emergency. Waves sometimes filled the ship to the top of the and the sailors about up to their breasts in brine until the roll of the spilled the water overboard or it ran back into the sea through the scuppers and hawse-holes.
 
The waves ran as high as the topsail yard. They would pile up to windward of us, gaining height and volume until we had to look up almost to see the tops. Just as a giant comber seemed ready to break in roaring and curl over and us, the staunch little brig would slip up the slope of water and ride over the summit in safety. Then the sea would shoot out on the other side of the vessel with a like that of a thousand serpents and rush skyward again, the wall of water and shot with foam and looking like a polished mass of or .
 
I had not imagined water could assume such wild and shapes. Those monster waves seemed with life, roaring out their of us and watching alertly with their devilish foam-eyes for a chance to leap upon us and crush us or sweep us to death on their .
 
I became genuinely now for the first time. A little touch of I had experienced in the tropics was as nothing. To the rail I went time and again to give up everything within me, except my soul, to the mad gods of sea. For two days I lay in my . I tried , fat bacon, everything that any sailor recommended, all to no purpose. I would have given all I for one moment upon something level and still, something that did not and and roll from side to side and rise and fall. I think the most wretched part of seasickness is the knowledge that you cannot run away from it, that you are penned in with it, that go where you will, on the royal yard or in the bilge, you cannot escape the ghastly nightmare even for a minute.
 
There is no use fighting it and no use dosing yourself with medicines or pickles or lemons or fat meat. Nothing can cure it. In spite of everything it will stay with you until it has worked its will to the uttermost, and then it will go away at last of its own accord, leaving you a , limp . I may add, to correct a general impression, that it is impossible to become seasoned to seasickness. One attack does not render the victim immun............