You would take a ship to be a dead thing like a table, as dead as bits of iron and canvas and wood.  That is because you always live on shore, and have never seen the sea, and drink milk.  Milk is a more accursed drink than water.

What with the captain and what with the man at the wheel, and what with the crew, a ship has no fair chance of showing a will of her own.

There is only one moment in the history of ships, that carry crews on board, when they act by their own free will.  This moment comes when all the crew are drunk.  As the last man falls drunk on to the deck, the ship is free of man, and immediately slips away.  She slips away at once on a new course and is never one yard out in a hundred miles.

It was like this one night with the Sea-Fancy.  Bill Smiles was there himself, and can vouch for it.  Bill Smiles has never told this tale before for fear that anyone should call him a liar.  Nobody dislikes being hung as much as Bill Smiles would, but he won’t be called a liar.  I tell the tale as I heard it, relevancies and irrelevancies, though in my more decent words; and as I made no doubts of the truth of it then, I hardly like to now; others can please themselves.

It is not often that the whole of a crew is drunk.  The crew of the Sea-Fancy was no drunkener than others.  It happened like this.

The captain was always drunk.  One day a fancy he had that some spiders were plotting against him, or a sudden bleeding he had from both his ears, made him think that drinking might be bad for his health.  Next day he signed the pledge.  He was sober all that morning and all the afternoon, but at evening he saw a sailor drinking a a glass of beer, and a fit of madness seized him, and he said things that seemed bad to Bill Smiles.  And next morning he made all of them take the pledge.

For two days nobody had a drop to drink, unless you count water, and on the third morning the captain was quite drunk It stood to reason they all had a glass or two then, except the man at the wheel; and towards evening the man at the wheel could bear it no longer, and seems to have had his glass like all the rest, for the ship’s course wobbled a bit and made a circle or two.  Then all of a sudden she went off south by east under full canvas till midnight, and never altered her course.  And at midnight she came to the wide wet courts of the Temple in the Sea.

People who think that Mr. Smiles is drunk often make a great mistake.  And people are not the only ones that have made that mistake.  Once a ship made it, and a lot of ships.  It’s a mistake to think that old Bill Smiles is drunk just because he can’t move.