One other man who was the shadow of a man was George Dorety.  He was the only passenger on board, a friend of the firm, and he had elected to make the voyage for his health.  But seven weeks of Cape Horn had not bettered his health.  He gasped and panted in his bunk through the long, heaving nights; and when on deck he was so bundled up for warmth that he resembled a peripatetic old-clothes shop.  At midday, eating at the cabin table in a gloom so deep that the swinging sea-lamps burned always, he looked as blue-gray as the sickest, saddest man for’ard.  Nor did gazing across the table at Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon him.  Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent.  The scowls were for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his existence, which was make westing. He was a big, hairy brute, and the sight of him was not stimulating to the other’s appetite.  He looked upon George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so, once each meal, savagely transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.

Nor did the mate prove a first aid to a languid appetite.  Joshua Higgins by name, a seaman by profession and pull, but a pot-wolloper by capacity, he was a loose-jointed, sniffling creature, heartless and selfish and cowardly, without a soul, in fear of his life of Dan Cullen, and a bully over the sailors, who knew that behind the mate was Captain Cullen, the lawgiver and compeller, the driver and the destroyer, the incarnation of a dozen bucko mates.  In that wild weather at the southern end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing.  His grimy face usually robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate.  Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain Cullen’s eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory thereto.  Whether the mate’s face was clean or dirty had no bearing upon westing.  Later on, when 50 deg. south in the Pacific had been reached, Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly.  In the meantime, at the cabin table, where gray twilight alternated with lamplight while the lamps were being filled, George Dorety sat between the two men, one a tiger and the other a hyena, and wondered why God had made them.  The second mate, Matthew Turner, was a true sailor and a man, but George Dorety did not have the solace of his company, for he ate by himself, solitary, when they had finished.

On Saturday morning, July 24, George Dorety awoke to a feeling of life and headlong movement.  On deck he found the Mary Rogers running off before a howling southeaster.  Nothing was set but the lower topsails and the foresail.  It was all she could stand, yet she was making fourteen knots, as Mr. Turner shouted in Dorety’s ear when he came on deck.  And it was all westing.  She was going around the Horn at last ... if the wind held.  Mr. Turner looked happy.  The end of the struggle