The things we do!

The frigate passed at some distance from
the Marquesas and the Sandwich Islands, crossed the tropic of Cancer,
and made for the China Seas. We were on the theatre of the last diversions
of the monster: and, to say truth, we no longer LIVED on board.
The entire ship's crew were undergoing a nervous excitement, of which I
can give no idea: they could not eat, they could not sleep--twenty times
a day, a misconception or an optical illusion of some sailor seated
on the taffrail, would cause dreadful perspirations, and these emotions,
twenty times repeated, kept us in a state of excitement so violent that a
reaction was unavoidable.
And truly, reaction soon showed itself. For three months,
during which a day seemed an age, the Abraham Lincoln furrowed
all the waters of the Northern Pacific, running at whales,
making sharp deviations from her course, veering suddenly
from one tack to another, stopping suddenly, putting on steam,
and backing ever and anon at the risk of deranging her machinery,
and not one point of the Japanese or American coast
was left unexplored.


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